The Canadian novelist and short story writer Alistair MacLeod, who has died aged 77, earned a wide, appreciative audience, although he wrote very little. He produced a single poetic novel, No Great Mischief (1999), preceded by two slender volumes of quietly rueful short stories, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986). His writing reflected his strong association with Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, where he spent his summers. For more than four decades he also taught literature and creative writing at the University of Windsor, Ontario.
His career as a writer began slowly, in the late 1960s, with short stories about Cape Breton and its sturdy people. An elegiac note permeates his early work, as in the opening tale of his first published story, The Boat, which begins: "There are times, even now, when I awake at four o'clock in the morning with the terrible fear that I have overslept; when I imagine that my father is waiting for me in the room below the darkened stairs." A granular quality marks his stories, which evoke a landscape of grey rocks bathed in sunlight, with squalls slanting in from the sea to drench a beleaguered but resilient population.
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