David Carpenter
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The current Haig-Brown Writer in Residence, David Carpenter was conceived in Saskatoon and born in Edmonton, where he grew up on Saskatchewan stories. He moved to Saskatoon in 1975 and began writing the following year.
His novel Niceman Cometh was his 10th book, a story about a Titania-like single mom, a pudgy Bottom-like dreamer, and a flesh-foolish disc jockey in the Saskatoon of the 1990s. He launched a new book of fiction in the fall of 2009, a collection of novellas entitled Welcome to Canada. Carpenter is currently at work on Volume One of The Literary History of Saskatchewan. He also just finished working on a nonfiction book, A Hunter's Confession, about the rise and fall of hunting as a pastime in North America. Carpenter’s writing credo is as follows (and it may not apply to poets): Most writers must learn to make a pact with dullness. Not boredom, or lack of imagination or passion, but dullness of routine. Keep your daily appointment with the computer screen and keep your ass on the chair until you’ve reached your daily quota. However rich your inner life may be, seek also the dullard within. Website: dccarpenter.com |
Ivan Coyote
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What is the future of B.C. writing? One answer is Ivan E. Coyote, as original and humorous as they come. While honing talents as an onstage comedian and spoken word recording artist, Coyote also keeps producing subversively comic and poignant stories of consistently high quality, leading to Coyote's sixth book in ten years, Missed Her (2010), another collection of gender-bending memoirs.
Born and raised in Whitehorse, Yukon, Ivan E. Coyote is the offspring of a welder and a government worker. “Although technically I fall into the biologically female category,” Coyote once wrote in an earlier story entitled “If I Was a Girl,” “I do lack most of the requirements for membership in the feminine realm.” A founding member of Taste This, a Vancouver performing group, Coyote released three collections of autobiographical writing prior to Missed Her. The Ottawa XPress has observed, “Coyote is to CanLit what k.d. lang is to country music: a beautifully odd fixture.” “I had a sex change once,” Coyote wrote, “when I was six years old.” That summer Coyote's mother bought Coyote a bikini for a beginner’s swimming class for ages five to seven. Trouble was, the top easily slid over Coyote's flat chest. “I was an accomplished tomboy by that time,” Coyote says, “so I was used to hating my clothes.” Arriving at the pool, Coyote didn’t wear the top. When the swimming instructor, a human bellhorn, blew her silver whistle, aggressively dividing them into two camps along sexual lines, short-haired Ivan crossed over. Website: ivanecoyote.com |
Steven Galloway
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Steven Galloway is the author of Finnie Walsh, Ascension, The Cellist of Sarajevo, and The Confabulist. He has won the Borders Original Voice Award, the OLA Evergreen Award, and the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature, and been nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Richard & Judy Book of the Year Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Canadian Booksellers Association Fiction Award, and the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award.
His work has been published in over thirty countries and optioned for film. He teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia, and lives with his wife and two young daughters in Vancouver, British Columbia. Website: stevengalloway.com |
Sarah Leavitt
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Sarah Leavitt’s first book, Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me, a graphic memoir, has been published in Canada, the US, UK, and Germany to international critical acclaim (LA Times, Vanity Fair, Globe and Mail, The Guardian, Die Welt).
It will be published in France in September 2014. Her prose and comics
have appeared in anthologies, magazines and newspapers in Canada, the US
and the UK.
Sarah holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, but is largely self-taught as an artist and cartoonist. She has taught workshops, developed an introductory university course on comics, and read from her work at numerous festivals. Sarah is currently working on her next book, a graphic novel set in mid-nineteenth-century British Columbia. Website: sarahleavitt.com |
Bernice Lever
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Bernice Lever, born in Smithers, BC, was a founder of WAVES, literary magazine: York University - from 1972-1987 and has published 9 books of poetry, (Red Letter Day, Black Moss, 2014), a teaching/learning CD: The Colour of Words, and over 200 short prose pieces. Her patience with committees has involved her in the Canadian Authors Association, League of Canadian Poets, Federation of BC Writers and other local writer groups. She has read poems, (some were prize winners), across Canada, USA and on 4 other continents. She has won four Lifetime Achievement awards, including CAA’s Sangster Award. From 1963 to 2000, she lived in a Toronto suburb except for 3 1/2 years in Cheshire, England and 18 months in USA.
Bernice, a child of 2 Alberta pioneer farm families, is a mother of 3 children, 2 grandchildren and 2 great granddaughters. As Writer-in-Residence for Canadian Authors Association - Vancouver, she continues in editing and marketing manuscripts for others which she began doing at Dundurn Press, Toronto. 1980's. Retired in 2000 from Seneca College's English Department, Toronto, she continues to give writing workshops across Canada, when she is not writing poetry or watching the deer walk by the seashore on Bowen Island, BC. Bernice Lever gets ‘high’ on words. Website: The Colour of Words |
Derek Lundy
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Derek Lundy’s latest book, Borderlands: Riding the Edge of America is about his motorcycle ride along the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada, and was recently shortlisted for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize.
He has degrees in history, international relations and law, and has held a wide variety of jobs—for example as a long-distance truck driver, factory worker, and museum guard, but was also for a while an executive editor at Butterworths Legal Publishers and a freelance contract lawyer. He has sailed almost all his life in small boats, including a passage around Cape Horn, and transatlantic in a square-rigger. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and lives with his wife and daughter on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia Website: dereklundy.com |
Richard Wagamese |
An Ojibway from the Wabasseemoong First Nation in Northwestern Ontario,
Richard Wagamese received the George Ryga Prize for Social Awareness in
2011 for One Story, One Song. He has also won a National
Newspaper Award for Column Writing for the Calgary Herald in 1990 and
the 2007 Canadian Authors Association MOSAID Technologies Inc. Award for
Fiction for his novel Dream Wheels. In 2012 he was chosen as a
recipient of a National Aboriginal Achievement Award (NAAA) as a
representative of media and communications. In 2013 he became the first
recipient of the Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit
Literature First Prize for Indian Horse, which also won the Canada Reads 2013 People's Choice award.
In Medicine Walk (2014) we meet 16-year-old Franklin Starlight as he saddles up to ride into town, feeling compelled to rescue his dissolute father, Eldon, someone he doesn't even know very well. Eldon is a drunk, dying of liver cancer in a flophouse. Frank dutifully accedes to his father's request to be taken into the mountains, into the woods, so he can be buried in a traditional Ojibway way. As they ride into the backcountry, Eldon's past comes to light: his poverty-stricken childhood, serving in the Korean War. Frank finally gets to know the father he seldom had. Richard Wagamese lives near Kamloops. Facebook page: Richard Wagamese - Ojibway Author |
Kathleen Winter
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Kathleen Winter is the author of boYs, published by Biblioasis and awarded the 2007 Metalf Rooke award. Excerpt: ...a thin dog sniffing behind porch lattice. Clouds, different one day than the next. Old woman getting the mail in her nightdress. Satellites and the moon. Maybe Mavis saw daddy longlegs in the clapboard, and carpenter beetles and dandelion leaves. Drumstick wrappers, man walking to the store for cigarettes, lost pink flea collar. I think of all these things, or things like them, and how they kept Mavis alive, and I weep for the small, moving things that mean something, anything, and how good they are, and how fortunate we are to be able to see them and touch them.
Kathleen's novel, Annabel (House of Anansi 2010) about a child born beyond gender and raised in a hyper-male trapper/hunter culture in remote Labrador, became a #1 bestseller in Canada. Out in 2011 with Grove Atlantic/Black Cat in the US and Jonathan Cape in the UK. Finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Award, and the Governor General's Award. Blog: http://kathleenwinter.livejournal.com/ |
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. |