Suzette Mayr

The Sleeping Car Porter, published in 2022, centres on R.T. Baxter, a closeted gay Black Canadian man working as a porter on a cross-Canada railway. Publishers Weekly named it one of the top ten works of fiction published in 2022.

In 2022, Mayr won the Giller Prize for her novel The Sleeping Car Porter.

Mayr's fourth novel, Monoceros, won the Relit and W. O. Mitchell Awards. It was also nominated for a Ferro-Grumley Award, and longlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize.

Mayr is a past president of the Writers' Guild of Alberta. In 2010, she served on the jury for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize, a literary award for emerging LGBT writers in Canada, selecting Nancy Jo Cullen as that year's prize winner.

Mayr worked as a waitress and sandwich maker before establishing herself as a professional writer. In addition to her six novels (Moon Honey, The Widows, Venous Hum, Monoceros, Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, and The Sleeping Car Porter), Mayr has published books of poetry and co-edited a literary anthology. Her novels and other literary works have been nominated for several awards. In 2002, Mayr participated in the Calgary Distinguished Writers Program at the University of Calgary, where she is now a professor in the Department of English and teaches courses on creative writing and contemporary literature studies. Mayr, a Canadian of German and Afro-Caribbean background, often explores issues of race, identity and sex in her writing through the stylistic use of humour, cultural mythologies and surreal imagery.

Hannelore Schmitt, Frau Schnadelhuber and Fraulein Clotilde are elderly German immigrant women who are determined to plunge over Niagara Falls in a barrel, aided by Schmitt's granddaughter Cleopatra Maria. The narration of the novel moves between the day they go over the Falls, and the events that lead up to that day. The novel is coloured with quotes from various individuals who went over the falls, including Annie Edson Taylor (the first person to survive riding over Niagara Falls in a barrel), who becomes a character in the story. The Widows was published by NeWest Press. The novel was translated into German by Christine Struh and Ursula Wukfekamp in 1999, with the title 3 Witwen und ein Wasserfall

Published by Broadview Press and edited by Mayr and Julia Gaunce, this anthology includes 26 stories and spans from the 19th to 21st century. The stories are organized chronologically and contain annotations for student readers.