Barbara Murray is an author, freelance writer and poet from British Columbia, Canada. For many years she worked as a newspaper reporter for the [1] Bowen Island Undercurrent, and has also done work for CBC Radio One, the Vancouver Province, the WestEnder, the North Shore Outlook and the Vancouver Courier newspapers. As recently as January 2009, Barbara wrote an article for the Vancouver Courier about the profession of midwifery in Vancouver titled First Hands [2]. In 2003, the Bowen Island Historians hired her to work on a coffee table book on Bowen’s history. The book, published in 2004, is Bowen Island Reflections, and is co-edited with Edythe Hanen and CBC’s former columnist, Jim Kearney. Barbara is the mother of three adult children.
Barbara's main body of work is the Bea and Mildred Mystery Series [3]. The first novel in the historical mystery series, Gifts and Bones, was published in 2007 by Soames Point Press [4] (Toronto, Canada). The second and third titles in the series are Isabella's Passion and Weight of the Heart. Barbara is also currently working on a novel series for children 10 and up: The Too Human Adventures, featuring the escapades of Jackie Too and her three quirky friends...Whalesear, Crane and Michael. While novel-writing has become Barbara's primary concentration, she has pursued several other creative avenues in her earlier years:
Prior to her life as a writer, Barbara was a dancer and choreographer. Barbara received some of her training in the dance department at Simon Fraser University, in BC, Canada. In the early 1990s she was hired by the Bear Island band of the Temagami First Nation[5] to co-choreograph the play N'Daki Menan (meaning Our Land), which was a Temagami First Nation's youth theatre production. The first summer the youth performed the play on Bear Island; during the second summer the youth toured N'Daki Menan across Canada. Barbara also operated a small dance troup on Bowen Island under the name of Marieka Productions.
While working on novel writing beginning in the mid-1990s, Barbara Murray developed an adult and baby clothing line: Fabric of the Earth and Bowen Baby Designs. She also created a line of gift cards, which were carried in the Vancouver Art Gallery gift shop, Duthie Books, and other outlets.