Katherine Gordon
A globe-trotting half-French, half-English expatriate Kiwi and a former contracts lawyer and First Peoples’ land claims negotiator, Katherine Gordon now lives in New Zealand, where she continues to write about B.C.’s historical, environmental, political and cultural issues and to work with First Peoples on intergovernmental relationships and strategy development. She is also on the Board of Directors of the First Peoples’ Cultural Foundation, an NGO working to ensure that B.C.’s indigenous languages remain a vibrant, living part of Canada’s future.
B.C. best-seller The Garden That You Are is Katherine Gordon’s fourth book. She has also written Made to Measure: A History of Land Surveying in British Columbia (Sono Nis Press, 2006) which won the 2007 Haig-Brown Regional Prize BC Book Award, and The Slocan: Portrait of a Valley (Sono Nis Press, 2004), which received an honourable mention in the 2004 Historical Writing Competition of the British Columbia Historical Federation and was shortlisted for the B.C. Book Awards’ Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 2005. Both books are also B.C. best-sellers. Her first book was A Curious Life: The Biography of Princess Peggy Abkhazi (Sono Nis Press, 2002). Gordon contributes to The Globe and Mail, the Times Colonist (Victoria), and The Vancouver Sun, as well as to magazines including Canadian Geographic, British Columbia, GardenWise, BC Business, and Canadian Homes and Cottages, and won National Magazine Award recognition in 2006 and 2009.
For more information, visit Katherine Gordon’s website.
Titles by the Author
The Biography of Princess Peggy Abkhazi
When Princess Peggy Abkhazi died in 1994 in her adopted hometown of Victoria, British Columbia, she not only bore a royal title, she also ruled over an exceedingly beautiful garden that had won international acclaim. It was a far cry from her unremarkable birth into tenuous circumstances in Shanghai.
Most remarkably, Peggy not only suffered internment in a Japanese camp in China during the Second World War, but she kept a clandestine journal during her entire two and a half years there. This journal was later published (and recently reprinted; see p. 15), offering a unique window onto the internment experience and illuminating Peggy’s equally unique strength of spirit.
