Elizabeth Hay

Giller Prize winner Elizabeth Hay hosts a conversation with Ireland’s Colm Tóibín , the award-winning author of The Master, winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Le prix du meilleur livre étranger, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and, Brooklyn , winner of the Costa Novel Award.

Colm recently published New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers & Their Families, a fascinating, informative, and entertaining collection of essays on the intricacies of family relationships in literature and writing. His latest novel is The Testament of Mary. It it, Mary, who we know from centuries of paintings and scripture as the docile, loving, silent, long-suffering, obedient, worshipful mother of Christ becomes a tragic heroine with the relentless eloquence of Electra or Medea or Antigone.

Special thanks to Sean Murray, our Author Patron for Colm Tóibín.

Becoming an Author Patron is a great way to support the Festival, our community and the author of your choice! (thebookpile)… (more)

Elizabeth Hay discusses Alone in the Classroom.

Elizabeth Hay, winner of the Giller Prize, returns with Alone in the Classroom , her most tense, intricate and seductive novel yet. In 1930, a school principal in Saskatchewan is suspected of abusing a student. Seven years later, on the other side of the country, a girl picking wild cherries meets a violent end. These are only two of the mysteries in the life of the narrator’s charismatic aunt, Connie Flood. As the narrator, Anne pieces together her aunt’s lifelong attachment to her former student Michael Graves, and her obsession with Parley Burns, the inscrutable principal implicated in the assault of Michael’s younger sister. Her own story becomes connected with that of the past, and the triangle of principal, teacher, student opens out into other emotional triangles—aunt, niece, lover; mother, daughter, granddaughter—until a sudden, capsizing love changes Anne’s life. Tickets $15 / $10 reduced. Free for festival members. (thebookpile)… (more)

Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air.

In conversation with Hal Wake. "In another life, a pre-bestselling writer’s life, Ottawa’s Elizabeth Hay spent 10 years as a CBC Radio broadcaster in Yellowknife, Winnipeg and Toronto. She knows, therefore, of what she writes in her Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning novel, Late Nights On Air (McClelland & Stewart, 2007). The setting is a small radio station in 1970s Yellowknife; the cast is a diverse collection of escapees and seekers from other worlds; the adventure is a six-week canoe trip through the barren northern tundra. The foreground tension is relationship-driven while the Berger Enquiry and the power struggle surrounding the proposed MacKenzie Valley gas pipeline create a different tension in the background. “Elegiac…exquisite…” Globe & Mail. Hay’s impressive body of work—recognized in 2002 with the Marian Engel Award—includes A Student of Weather, a Giller Prize finalist; Garbo Laughs, a Governor General’s Award finalist, and Small Change, short listed for both the Trillium Award and the Governor General’s Award.

Hal Wake, Artistic Director of the Vancouver International Writers Festival, will join Elizabeth Hay for a discussion of her work." (christiguc)… (more)