Wayne Grady |
Wayne Grady is the 2015-16 Haig-Brown Writer-in-Residence. Grady is the author of 14 books, the translator of 15 novels from French to English, and the editor of 11 anthologies of literary fiction and non-fiction.
He was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Translation in 1989 and nominated again in 1995 and 2005. His extensive travels through the Gobi Desert, Patagonia, the United States and a visit to the North Pole have all informed his extensive travel and environmental writing. Tree: A Life Story was co-authored with David Suzuki in 2007 and was shortlisted for the BC Book of the Year. His first novel Emancipation Day (Doubleday 2013) was long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Award and won the Amazon First Novel Award. Photo and description taken from: http://www.waynegrady.ca/ |
Eve Joseph
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Eve Joseph was born in 1953, grew up in North Vancouver and now lives in Victoria. Her recently-released book about death and dying, In the Slender Margin (Patrick Crean Editions, 2014; Arcade Publishing 2016), won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Award. Her two books of poetry, The Startled Heart (Oolichan, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (Brick, 2010) were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Award and in 2010 she was awarded the P.K. Page Founder’s Award for poetry. Her work has been published in a wide number of Canadian and American journals and anthologies. Her nonfiction has been shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards and her essay “Intimate Strangers” was nominated for a National Magazine Award and won both the Malahat Review’s Nonfiction Award and the Western Magazine Awards “Gold” category for the B.C. and Yukon Territories. Of the piece in the Malahat, the final judge wrote: “the essay illuminates one of the great mysteries of the human condition with a supple and often incandescent array of imagery, insight, allusion, even humour – and a daring lack of sentimentality.”
Photo and description taken from: https://evejoseph.wordpress.com/ |
John Vaillant
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John Vaillant is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Outside, among others. His first book, The Golden Spruce (Norton, 2005), was a bestseller and won several awards, including the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction (Canada). His second nonfiction book, The Tiger (Knopf, 2010), is also an award-winning bestseller. His latest book, a novel, is The Jaguar’s Children (HMH/Knopf Canada).
Author video on YouTube Photo and description taken from: http://www.thetigerbook.com |
Lucia Misch
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Lucia Misch grew up at an astronomical observatory near San Jose, California. Since moving to Canada, she has made a place for herself in the spoken word community, teaching and touring across the country. Lucia has written and performed poems for organizations including Human Rights Watch and the United Food Workers Union Women's Network, and presented original work at The 2015 Vancouver Fringe Festival and The 2015 Vancouver Writer's Festival.
As an arts educator, Lucia is a veteran workshop leader with Vancouver Poetry House's WordPlay program, and has worked with youth in and outside of the classroom as part of Speak Up! in Montreal, Brendan McLeod's Travelling Slam, and BC's youth spoken word festival, Hullabaloo. In 2015 she served as an ArtStarts project poet in residence in Tsawwassen, BC, and later that year was a guest teacher at a Media Poetry Studio, a day camp that empowers young women to find their voices through film making and literary art. Her keen, illuminating writing is driven by the realization that just about everything in this world is funny because it's true, and sad because it's true. Sometimes witty, sometimes haunting, always thoughtful, Lucia's words lean between poetry and lyric, monologue and song. Author and poet Robert Priest says of her work: "the future of poetry is safe and dangerous thanks to Lucia Misch." |
Tracey Lindberg
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Tracey Lindberg, a woman of Cree-Metis ancestry from northern Alberta, is a professor of law and an Indigenous-rights activist. She has a doctoral degree in law as well as law degrees from the University of Ottawa, Harvard Law School and the University of Saskatchewan. She was awarded the Governor General's Gold Medal, the most prestigious award given to a doctoral student in humanities (other past recipients include Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Robert Bourassa and Gabrielle Roy). She has been professor of law at the University of Ottawa and is currently at Athabasca University, where she is Chair of the Centre for World Indigenous Knowledge and the Canada Research Chair of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge, Legal Orders and Laws.
Professor Lindberg has published many legally based articles in areas related to Indigenous law and Indigenous women, and she is also a fiction writer, with stories published in a number of literary journals, as well as a blues singer. As she describes herself, she is next in a long line of argumentative Cree women. This is her first novel. |
Grant Lawrence
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For years, the gregarious and encyclopedic Lawrence has hosted the top-rated CBC Radio 3 Podcast with Grant Lawrence, a monthly showcase of Canadian independent music.
In the fall of 2013, Grant released his second book, entitled The Lonely End of the Rink: Confessions of a Reluctant Goalie, The new book is a darkly hilarious memoir of Grant’s conflicted relationship with the game of hockey and his position as goaltender on his beer league hockey team, the championship-winning Vancouver Flying Vees. His sophomore writing effort was an immediate bestseller, debuting at #3 on the National Nonfiction Paperback List, and hitting #1 on the BC Bestsellers list, and won the BC Book Prize for the 2014 Book of the Year (Grant Lawrence is the only BC author to have won this award twice). Grant’s first book, Adventures in Solitude, is a memoir of his experiences spending his summers growing up in the coastal wilderness of Desolation Sound, BC, which went to #1 on the BC Bestsellers List, #2 on the National Bestsellers List, won the BC Book Prize for the 2010 Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the inaugural Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction. Grant still spends much of each summer at his cabin in the Sound between MC gigs at summer festivals. Grant is married to Canadian singer Jill Barber and they live together with their son Joshua in Vancouver, BC Canada. Photo and excerpt from: grantlawrence.ca |
Lori Shenher
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Lorimer (aka Lori) Shenher was born and raised in Calgary, living there with his parents, older brother and younger sister, until moving to Vancouver in 1991. Lorimer holds a BA in English from the University of Calgary, a degree miraculously achieved while pursuing a double major in basketball and beer.
Lorimer’s first love has always been writing and he worked as a copy runner for the Calgary Herald before venturing off into the world of weekly newspapers in rural Alberta, working as a reporter and photographer covering the Junior Hockey, local crime and political beats. Sports and fitness continue to play a large role in Lorimer’s life and he has proudly completed both the Calgary and New York City marathons. He is an accredited Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist and Certified Personal Trainer and continues to train with friends and family. Lorimer joined the Vancouver Police Department as a constable in 1991, completing assignments in Patrol, Communications, the Prostitution Task Force, the Strike Force, Homicide/Missing Persons, Diversity Relations, Financial Crime, and the Threat Assessment Unit. Lorimer undertook numerous undercover assignments in drug, sex work, and homicide files over the course of his career. In 2013, Lorimer took medical leave to receive treatment for a Post Traumatic Stress Injury and continues to work toward recovery. In 2015, Greystone Books published That Lonely Section of Hell: the botched investigation of a serial killer who almost got away, a memoir of working on Vancouver’s Missing and Murdered Women file. It was named a 2015 Globe & Mail Top 100 Book. In 2015, Lorimer began a gender transition to male. He lives with his partner, their three children and their dog in Vancouver. He continues to write and is currently pursuing an MA in Professional Communications at Royal Roads University. |
Timothy Taylor
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Timothy Taylor started life as a banker, the unlikely story of which may be found here. He has an MBA from the Queens University School of Business and a BA Economics from the University of Alberta. He became a freelance journalist and novelist after his short time in business and, as of July 2013, has been full time faculty at the UBC Creative Writing Program.
Taylor's first novel Stanley Park was published in 2001. It was an immediate bestseller and a critical success. He's since published a prize-winning collection of short fiction, Silent Cruise, and two further bestselling and critically acclaimed novels, Story House and The Blue Light Project, which was award the CBC Bookie Prize in the literary fiction category. He is also the winner of the Journey Prize, and has been finalist or runner-up for six other major national fiction prizes in Canada, including the prestigious Giller Prize. His work has also been chosen as the ‘One Book One City’ selection for Vancouver and named a finalist for Canada Reads. Taylor's most recent book is Foodville, a nonfiction account of his life as a food writer and self-identified non-foodie who is nevertheless a passionate eater.Taylor has also been widely published and recognized for his non-fiction magazine and newspaper work. He was the Big Ideas columnist for the Globe and Mail's Report on Business Magazine for several years and has been winner or finalist in over twenty separate magazine awards, including six nominations in 2012 for National and Western Magazine Awards in Canada. Taylor is a contributing editor at Vancouver Magazine and a regular contributor at EnRoute Magazine, Walrus, and Eighteen Bridges magazines. He has also written for Institutional Investor, The Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine, Western Living, The Vancouver Review, Toro Magazine, Saturday Night, Adbusters, the National Post, the Vancouver Sun and many others. Photo from UBC and description taken from timothytaylor.ca |
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. |