Norman Levine was born on October 22, 1923 in Ottawa, Ontario, but spent most of his adult life in England.

His wealthy Jewish family had fled from Poland to Canada with the advent of anti-semitism in the years prior to World War II. His adolescence was spent on the streets of Ottawa, but his coming of age was his time as a Lancaster bomber pilot for the Canadian division of the Royal Air Force. He was based at Leeming.

Post-war he met an Englishwoman, Margaret, settled down and they had three children. His writing, a reflection of his life, was also a direct influence on that life, as he had little money to keep up rent payments; as a result his family often moved.

After England he lived, for a time, in Canada, with his second wife. He also lived in France before, finally, returning to England, where he died some ten years later.

In 2002 he was presented with the Matt Cohen Prize (established in 2001 by the Writers' Trust of Canada to recognize a lifetime of work by a Canadian writer).

Short stories

• One Way Ticket (1961)
• I Don’t Want to Know Anyone Too Well (1971)
• Thin Ice (1979)
• Why Do You Live So Far Away? (1984)
• Champagne Barn (1984)
• The Beat and the Still (1990)
• Something Happened Here (1991)
• The Ability to Forget (2003)

Novels

• The Angled Road (1952)
• From a Seaside Town (1970)

Poetry

• Myssium (1948)
• The Tight-rope Walker (1950)
• I Walk by the Harbour (1976)

Non-fiction

• Canada Made Me (1958)
• "Sometimes It Works" (in How Stories Mean, edited by John Metcalf and J.R. Struthers) (1993)

Editor

• Canadian Winter's Tales (1968)