Martha Baillie was born in Toronto, in 1960, and educated in a French-English bilingual school. At seventeen she left for Scotland where she studied history and modern languages (French and Russian) at the University of Edinburgh.

She completed her studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Toronto. While at university, Baillie became involved in theatre.

She continued to act after graduation, taking scene study workshops and classes in voice and movement, while supporting herself by waitressing and teaching private French classes.

In 1981, she took an extended trip through parts of Asia including Hong Kong, China, Thailand, Burma, Nepal and India. This experience inspired her to switch her focus from acting to writing. Upon her return to Canada, she acquired an Ontario teaching certificate and briefly taught ESL to adults and French immersion to grade five students.

Today, she works part-time for the Toronto Public Library. She has done so for nearly twenty years, performing as a storyteller in schools, and day cares, organizing poetry readings, and community film screenings.

Canoeing and hiking are two of her principal passions, along with visual art, the theatre and opera.

Baillie’s first novel, My Sister Esther, was published in 1995, followed by Madame Balashovskaya’s Apartment in 1999. The later was also published in both Hungary and Germany. In 2006 her third novel, The Shape I Gave You came out with Knopf Canada, and was a national bestseller.

In The Incident Report (2009), Baillie uses the format of 144 short reports to recount incidents from her own experiences as a librarian.[3] As a work of fiction the novel contains conventional elements such as "a love story and a mystery"; as a report, it presents a subtext depicting "how Toronto libraries have become a refuge for the city's marginalized.

Martha has had poems published in journals including Descant, Prairie Fire and The Antigonish Review, and her non-fiction piece, The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach was published by Brick magazine (Summer 2007). Baillie has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. She lives in Toronto with her daughter and husband.