Stephanie Berryman is a Canadian novelist, poet, and nonfiction writer. She grew up on the prairies and lives on the west coast with her husband and two kids. Both landscapes live in her — you will find the wind rippling across golden wheat fields, orcas leaping from the wild oceans, and the towering, moss-covered cedars of the old growth forests in her poetry, her fiction, and her heart.
Stephanie’s life was shaped by her younger brother, Joel, who had severe cerebral palsy. Joel couldn't speak, but he was one of the happiest, most loving and expressive people she has ever known. Writing about Joel’s life and the deep love between them taught her early that the most important stories often live in the margins.
When Stephanie was eleven years old, her mother, Joanne, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. She was given a ten percent chance of survival. Joanne told the doctors to do whatever it took because she had four children under the age of eleven and she absolutely refused to die. Her love lives on although Joanne’s health journey culminated in early onset Alzheimers and her death in 2008, a full and extraordinary twenty-three years after she refused to let cancer take her from her children.
Stephanie’s debut novel, What She Left Behind, is upmarket women's fiction exploring the weight of all that women carry, mother-daughter relationships, family secrets and the echoes of choices made under impossible circumstances. She is currently seeking representation.
An adventurer at heart, Stephanie spent her early twenties leading canoe and kayak wilderness expeditions and has lived and taught in South Korea and Australia. She has wandered through Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia — always writing, always paying attention. She has run her own business doing leadership development coaching and consulting for the past fifteen years.
Stephanie is a graduate of SFU's The Writer's Studio and holds a BA in English. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Grain Magazine, The Ascent, and other publications. She has published a poetry chapbook, This is What Love Tastes Like, and is at work on a memoir, Love Needs No Language, about her brother Joel. Her nonfiction book Working Well: Twelve Simple Strategies to Manage Stress and Increase Productivity (2019) was an Amazon bestseller.
"Stephanie Berryman's deeply felt writing balances empathy with an exactitude of detail — her writing evokes the universal inside the deeply personal."
— Kevin Chong, author of The Double Life of Benson Yu