Bernadette McDonald


Bernadette McDonald is a Canadian-born author of several non-fiction books, primarily on mountain culture topics. Her books include Brotherhood of the Rope, Tomaž Humar, Freedom Climbers, and Art Of Freedom.

Life and career

McDonald was born in 1951, in Biggar, Saskatchewan, the daughter of Lester and Erna Kelly. She grew up on a prairie farm. Her childhood and most of her education was focused on music, with a special emphasis on the performance of contemporary classical chamber music. She studied at Pacific Lutheran University, the University of Western Ontario and The Banff Centre. She moved to the Canadian Rockies in the early 1970s.
She volunteered for the Banff Mountain Film Festival and she worked at The Banff Centre for twenty years, directing various Banff Mountain festivals and starting the Mountain Culture division. She resigned from her position of vice president, Mountain Culture in 2006 to concentrate on writing.
She lectures on a variety of mountain topics for universities, festivals, and alpine clubs; sje consults on mountain cultural issues with start-up festivals and mountain institutes, and curates mountain-related exhibitions. She has a number of honors, including the Alberta Order of Excellence, the Summit of Excellence Award, the King Albert Award and several mountain literary prizes such as the 2011 and the 2017 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. She was Canada's representative at the United Nations to launch the International Year of Mountains.
She lives with her husband Alan McDonald in Banff, Alberta and in Naramata, British Columbia.

Works

As author