QUILLBLOG

Tundra Books founder May Cutler, 1923-2011

Publishing pioneer May Cutler has died at the age of 87 at her home in Montreal. She was the first  Canadian woman to found a children’s publishing company, creating Tundra Books in 1967 from the basement of her home. She ran the press for 28 years, publishing iconic works such as Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater. Cutler was also the first female mayor of Westmount, elected in 1987 and serving four years in office. From Montreal’s The Gazette:

[Cutler] ran Tundra … as she was raising four boys, and managed also to write a novel, The Last Noble Savage (1967). She later wrote two plays, a musical, and a biography, Breaking Free: The Story of William Kurelek.

Cutler was the first to publish high-profile award winners, like [William] Kurelek (They Sought a New World, A Prairie Boy’s Winter) and Stéphane Poulin, who wrote stories about Josephine the cat.

From the Tundra Books blog:

May’s accomplishments were remarkable, and after completing an MA in journalism from Columbia University, she worked for the United Nations, then as a journalist and later taught in the English department at McGill where she set up a three-year extension program in journalism. …

But we will always know her as the founder of Tundra Books, which she ran for almost 30 years. May was a visionary, and her passion for the arts and creating children’s books as works of art was evident in titles by renowned artists such as William Kurelek, Ted Harrison, Arthur Shilling, Song Nan Zhang, and many others. She is also responsible for the discovery of the incomparable Dayal Kaur Khalsa, who admired her publisher so much that she named the heroine of her books May.