About Edie Ayala

Contemporary Fiction Author

“Our stories are our most valuable asset. They define us. They are the best of what we leave behind.”

Edie Ayala is a baby boomer from a small logging town in British Columbia. As a girl, she once broke into a neighbour’s house to play on their typewriter. She was the creative fort-builder, the abandoned mine-shaft explorer and the tree climber. She has never lost this spirit of curiosity and the search for those small nuggets that might change a day… or a life.

Just before Y2K, she made a trip to South America and it was a turning point. Married to a Chilean from the Atacama region, they decided to make Santiago, Chile their home and they’ve been there ever since. Their grown children are all settled in different cities in Canada and the UK.

Edie writes character-driven novels. Her first, South of Centre is a saga set in northern Chile in and around the time of the Pinochet regime. With all of its myths and superstitions, it seeks to get to the bottom of various tangled family relationships. The second Hard Bed Hotel is a humorous love story where confusion between the living and the dead takes you on an eventful romp through Santiago’s more ‘popular’ neighborhoods. Her third novel, Threads takes a hard look at the global business of fast fashion. Two women on opposite ends of the globe are connected through love and loss.

Ayala is a fan of quirky. A people-watcher, she might find inspiration from someone at a bus stop or a grocery store. Once in awhile, as if from nowhere, a compelling new character appears out of the page itself, and hijacks the process.

She spends her free time reading fiction and non-fiction books and is a fan of revisionist history podcasts by Malcolm Gladwell. She leans towards authors such as José Saramago, Barbara Kingsolver, Anthony Doer, Louis de Barnieres, Hernan Rivera Letelier and David Sedaris.