Fonds F0136 - Christine van der Mark fonds.

Born in Calgary, Alberta, Christine van der Mark attended Normal School and spent five years teaching in rural Alberta schools. She then completed a B.A. and M.A. at the University of Alberta, studying creative writing under F.M. Salter; in 1946 she submitted her first novel, In Due Season, as her thesis.

In Due Season (1947), which explores the human costs of pioneering in northern Alberta through the 1930s, went on to win the Oxford-Crowell prize for Canadian fiction.

During three years of writing and teaching at the university, she married, and from 1953 to 1964 her husband's work led the family to Montreal, Pakistan, the USA, England, and the Sudan, before they settled in Ottawa. Throughout her many travels, van der Mark continued writing stories, articles, and a short novel with a Pakistani setting, Hassan (1960).

In 1960 she began Honey in the Rock (1966), which focused on a tightly knit community of ‘Brethren in Christ’ in southern Alberta in 1936–7.

The novel was completed in Ottawa and followed by three unpublished works: Where the Long River Flows, a Novel of the Mackenzie; Paul Goss, about a rural teacher in remote northern Alberta; and No Longer Bound, an autobiographical piece.

See ‘Afterword’ by van der Mark's daughter, Dorothy Wise, in the 1966 reprint of In Due Season.

Biographical information is available in The Oxford Companion to Canadian literature, 2nd ed., p. 1152.