Elizabeth Hay (1)

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 ... (more)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.

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 ... (more)(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."