McFee, Oonah

Oonah McFee was a Toronto novelist and short story writer. Raised in Ottawa and the Gatineau Valley, McFee (nee Browne) was the former wife of CBC radioman Alan McFee. She came to writing in middle age, enrolling in a creative writing course in the mid-1960s at the North Toronto Y, as well as a three-month seminar course at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel, Mexico in 1967, and the Breadloaf Summer School in Vermont in 1971. She was a Writer-in-Residence at Trent University in 1979, and has conducted readings and lectures across Canada. Her most famous work of fiction is Sandbars, a novel set in Ottawa in the 1930s. Upon its publication in 1977, it was immediately considered a Canadian classic. After the publication of Sandbars, she spent thirteen years researching and drafting a sequel to Sandbars entitled Silent Eyes, which was never published.