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Merilyn Simonds (born 1949 in Winnipeg, Manitoba) is a Canadian writer. She spent her childhood in Brazil, and returned to Canada as a teenager, where she was educated at the University of Western Ontario. She subsequently worked as a freelance writer, and was an editor of Harrowsmith.

Her most famous book is The Convict Lover, published in 1996. That book, a finalist for the 1996 Governor General's Awards, resulted when Simonds found a cache of romantic letters in her attic, written by a prison inmate to a woman who formerly occupied Simonds' house. With only half the story available to her, Simonds published the letters interspersed with her own historical research and speculation about the woman and her romance with a prisoner.

In 1991, Simonds also co-wrote the book accompaniment to the controversial CBC Television documentary The Valour and the Horror.

Simonds also frequently publishes lifestyle and nature journalism for magazines such as Canadian Geographic, Saturday Night and Equinox. She published her first novel, The Holding, in 2004. From September to December 2006 she served as the Writer in Residence at Green College, University of British Columbia.

Simonds lives with writer and translator Wayne Grady outside Kingston, Ontario.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Merilyn Simonds", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0