Award-winning Canadian author Eden Robinson will share from her 2017 Giller Prize-nominated novel Son of a Trickster on Oct. 23 during the next instalment of the Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series.
Robinson, the author of six novels, is the recipient of the 2001 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for Monkey Beach, and earned the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award in 2016 for her body of work. She was also awarded the $50,000 Writers’ Trust Fellowship in 2017.
Robinson grew up in Haisla territory near Kitamaat Village, in British Columbia. After earning her BA, she moved to Vancouver and later enrolled in the masters program at the University of British Columbia after having a short story published in its literary magazine PRISM international. Her first novel, Traplines, was published in 1996 and won the U.K.’s Winifred Holtby prize.
She has become one of Canada’s first female Indigenous writers to gain international attention, making her an important role model. Her novel Son of a Trickster journeys through the life of teenager, Jared, who tried to make sense of a broken family, substance abuse, poverty and spirituality. It is the first book in a Trickster trilogy, with the second book Trickster Drift released this year.
Canadian Writers in Person is a for-credit course for students, presented by the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS). It is also a free admission event for members of the public. All readings take place at 7 p.m. on select Tuesday evenings in 206 Accolade West Building, Keele Campus.
Other presentations scheduled in this series include:
Nov. 6: Canisia Lubrin, Voodoo Hypothesis, Wolsak & Wynn Publishers
Nov. 20: Joel Hynes, We All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night, HarperCollins
Dec. 4: Stevie Howell, I left nothing inside on purpose, M&S
2019
Jan. 15: Michael Redhill, Bellevue Square, Random House
Jan. 29: Kerri Sakamoto, Floating City, Random House
Feb. 12: Kim Fu, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, HarperCollins
March 6: Katerena Vermette, The Break, House of Anansi Press
March 19: David Chariandy, Brother, Penguin Random House
Canadian Writers in Person is a course offered out of the Culture and Expression program in the Humanities Department in York’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies. For more details and information, contact Professor Gail Vanstone at gailv@yorku.ca.