Heather Mallick

Heather Mallick (born 1959) is a Canadian columnist, author and lecturer. She has been a staff columnist for the Toronto Star since 2010, writing a news column on Saturday and on the opinion page on Monday and Wednesday. She writes about feminism, news and politics. She has previously written for the Toronto Sun, The Globe and Mail, and the Financial Post.

Mallick was born in Norway House, Manitoba, to an Indian Bengali father from Kolkata and a Scottish mother. She was raised in the Northern Ontario town of Kapuskasing, and in other remote communities where her father worked as a physician. During her childhood, she very much enjoyed reading. At the age of nine she had finished Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and when she turned 11 she read Lucy Crown by Irwin Shaw. Mallick attended the University of Toronto where she received a bachelor's and Master of Arts degrees in English Literature. She also earned a bachelor's degree in Journalism from Ryerson University after attending Seymour Hersh's lecture about Vietnam War's My Lai Massacre and studying there for two years. While studying, she worked for the local student newspaper, The Ryersonian and during her late university years worked as a summer intern in coveted reporting for The Globe and Mail. Mallick is an atheist.

After graduation, she got another summer internship at the Toronto Star, while maintaining a freelance reporter position at The Globe. In 1988, she was employed at the Canadian financial daily newspaper Financial Post where she first worked as a copy editor and later became a news editor. She left Financial Post in 1991, after marrying Stephen Petherbridge, a senior British/Canadian journalist.

She first came to public notice in Canada during the 1990s as the book review editor and writer for the Sunday edition of the Toronto Sun, where she won two Canadian Newspaper Association National Newspaper Awards for critical writing in 1994 and feature writing in 1996. Mallick had quit the Sun in 1999 with a quote "I could not bear the thought of turning 40 and working there."

Mallick later wrote for The Globe and Mail where her left-of-centre political opinion column "As If" was a regular part of the paper's Saturday edition until December 2005. She also wrote major and minor pieces for the newspaper on lifestyle and other issues as well as Chatelaine magazine. She joined the Toronto Star in August 2010.

Mallick's first book, Pearls in Vinegar, was published in September 2004, in Canada. She published a collection of new essays for Knopf Canada in April 2007, entitled Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life.

In October 2007, Mallick gave the second annual Mel Hurtig Lecture on the Future of Canada, at the University of Alberta.

Shortly after joining The Toronto Star in 2010, Mallick wrote an article describing her "painful sordid history" with Fox News, "with rancour on their side and disgust on mine."