Paulette Jiles

Paulette Jiles was an American poet, memoirist and historical novelist born in Salem, Missouri, in 1943. After moving to Canada in the late 1960s, she worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and helped establish community radio stations serving Indigenous communities in northern Ontario and Quebec. She initially gained recognition as a poet before turning increasingly to fiction, bringing a poet’s economy and attention to landscape to her portrayals of the American frontier. She later settled in the Texas Hill Country, where she lived and worked until her death in 2025.

Jiles’s historical novels include Enemy Women, set in divided Missouri during the American Civil War; Stormy Weather, about a Texas family during the Great Depression; The Color of Lightning, inspired by the experiences of freedman Britt Johnson on the post-war frontier; and Chenneville, a story of murder and vengeance after the Civil War. Her best-known novel, News of the World, follows an elderly travelling news reader escorting a girl who had lived with the Kiowa across Reconstruction-era Texas. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and was adapted as a film. Her fiction combines Western adventure with themes of displacement, survival, cultural conflict and the difficult reconstruction of families and communities after war.