Myra Paperny

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Myra Paperny (born Myra Green on September 19, 1932) is a Canadian author and former academic. She was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and grew up in Ponoka, Alberta, and later in British Columbia.

Education and early career
She earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of British Columbia in 1953 and a Master of Science in journalism from Columbia University in 1954. Paperny began her career as a newspaper reporter, working for the Vancouver Province in 1952 and the Vancouver News Herald in 1953. She later did freelance work for CBC Radio.

Academia and writing life
Paperny taught creative writing at Mount Royal College in 1965 and then at the University of Calgary from 1966 to 1975, leaving academia to work in public relations. She edited Councilwoman from 1970 to 1973 before publishing her first book, The Wooden People, in 1976. She and her family also provided material for her writing, drawing on memories and researching Alberta.

The Wooden People and awards
The Wooden People won the 1975 Little, Brown Children’s Book Award (awarded for an unpublished manuscript) and the 1976 Canada Council Children’s Literature Prize in the English-language category. The book was published in 1976 and helped establish her as a children’s author.

Later works and themes
Paperny published Take a Giant Step in 1987 and Nightmare Mountain in 1988. Her fourth book, The Greenies, appeared in 2005. Much of her early work drew on family memories and Alberta settings. For The Wooden People, she used Eaton’s mail-order catalogs and set the story years before the Great Depression. She has said there is no direct link between her own youth and that book. For The Greenies, she initially planned a story set in British Columbia after World War II but instead wrote about Jewish children who moved to Canada after the war as orphans.

Personal life
Paperny is married and has four children.