Zsuzsi Gartner

Zsuzsi Gartner is a Canadian author and journalist.

Gartner was born in Winnipeg and moved to Calgary in early childhood. She earned a BA in political science at the University of Calgary, later receiving an honours degree in journalism from Carleton University in Ottawa and an MFA from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she currently resides.

Gartner started her career as a newspaper and magazine journalist for a number of publications, including the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail, Saturday Night, Quill and Quire, The Georgia Straight, Western Living and Canadian Business. Her work has brought her three Western Magazine Awards, including a Gold Award in 2003 for feature writing. In 2005 she won the Canadian National Magazine Awards' Silver award for Fiction. She has worked as a senior editor at Saturday Night and books editor for The Georgia Straight. Her 2011 novel Better Living Through Plastic Explosives was a shortlisted nominee for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

She is also a writer of short stories, which have appeared in a number of publications. She published a collection of these stories, All the Anxious Girls on Earth in 1999.

Gartner has been writer-in-residence at the University of British Columbia and a member of the faculty at Banff Centre's Writing Studios.

Gartner defended Mordecai Richler's novel Barney's Version on the CBC's Canada Reads 2004.