About Olivia

Throughout her career in book publishing, Olivia became fascinated by the complicated world of CanLit. She researched emerging trends in the Canadian market, championed literary diversity in both of Canada's official languages and planned Canada’s involvement at international book fairs in Guadalajara, Bologna, Shanghai and Havana. Her unabashed curiosity and desire to flex her creative muscles took her to England to pursue an MA in Writing for Children in 2012. There, she wrote her first manuscript for middle-grade readers.

Olivia is passionate about travelling throughout Canada and uncovering the stories it keeps. During her Master of Journalism degree at Carleton University she was drawn to people-driven narratives and experimented with new digital mediums to better help tell these stories.

Her reporting has taken her to Whitehorse to write about an innovative tiny home-building project in Carcross/Tagish First Nation; to Edmonton to investigate how its public library is helping patrons experiencing homelessness; to Ontario’s cottage country to report on precarious housing and employment opportunities for those who live there year-round.

Olivia has worked in local newsrooms such as the Ottawa Citizen and the Haliburton Echo. She was rabble.ca’s 2019 Jack Layton Journalism for Change Fellow where her Master’s Research Project was published. Her six-part series focused on the state of the public library in Canada as the third place – a frontline for reconciliation, social work, opioid overdose prevention and food security.

She was a 2019 Joan Donaldson CBC News Scholarship recipient and worked in CBC’s Toronto and Ottawa newsrooms in current affairs radio and with the health unit. That year she was also awarded the 2019 Fraser MacDougall Prize for Best New Canadian Voice in Human Rights for a story she wrote in journalism school about toilet privilege and public washroom access in Ottawa.

She is the 2020 recipient of IBBY's Frances E. Russell Grant and hopes to explore how middle-grade readers in Canada consume journalism.