Esta Spalding

Esta Alice Spalding is a Canadian author, screenwriter and poet who won the Pat Lowther Award in 2000 for Lost August. Born in Boston, Massachusetts to Phillip Spalding and Linda Spalding, she grew up in Hawaii and currently resides in Guelph, Ontario.

In 1997, Spalding relocated to Vancouver, British Columbia, where she worked as an executive story editor and writer on CBC's prime-time drama Da Vinci's Inquest. She also worked as a writer and executive story editor on all three seasons of The Eleventh Hour, a prime-time drama about investigative journalists on CTV. Both series were highly critically acclaimed and repeatedly won Gemini awards for Best Series.

Spalding adapted Barbara Gowdy's novel Falling Angels into a 2003 feature film that was directed by Scott Smith. The movie premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and played at Sundance Film Festival, and garnered many awards and nominations, including a Genie nod for Best Writing for Spalding. That year, she also co-wrote (with Deepa Mehta) the script adaptation of Carol Shields' Republic of Love, which Mehta directed. Her 2007 original movie of the week, In God's Country broke records for viewership on CTV. She and Tassie Cameron co-wrote the script for Would Be Kings, a movie of the week that premiered on CTV in 2008 to great critical acclaim and for which they were nominated for the Gemini award for Best Writing. Most recently, she was a writer and story consultant on the CBS/CTV hit series Flashpoint. She also wrote the teleplay of the episode 3x04 "Wash, Rinse, Repeat" of Being Erica.

Spalding and her mother Linda Spalding co-wrote a novel, Mere, which was published in 2001.

She is a contributing editor to the literary magazine Brick.

She has a B.A from University of Chicago and an M.A. from Stanford University.