Greg Hollingshead, author of three novels and four story collections, will share from his most recent collection Act Normal on Nov. 3 when he is featured at the Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series from 7 to 10pm at 206 Accolade West Building.
Act Normal, Hollingshead’s fourth story collection, was published in August 2015, and it includes 12 contemporary stories about people “doing their best to connect in a mad world.”
The book was released on the 20th anniversary of the publication of his award-winning collection The Roaring Girl, which won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1995.
Over his career as a writer, he has received recognition for his novel The Healer, which in 1998 won the Rogers Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Following that success, Hollingshead’s novel Bedlam, published in 2004, was on the longlist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and also earned a spot in the Globe and Mail’s 100 Best Books of the Year and the 2006 New York Times’ Book Review Editors’ Choice.
His work has been published internationally, and in 2007 he was the recipient of the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Gold Medal for Excellence in the Arts. In 2012, he was awarded the Order of Canada.
Hollingshead was raised in nearby Woodbridge, Ont., and he earned his BA and MA in English from the University of Toronto. He completed his PhD at the University of London.
He has published more than 70 works since 1976, and is a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta. He now resides in Toronto.
The Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series, presented by the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS), is bringing 11 Canadian writers to campus this year for an up-close and personal event.
More events in the series include:
Nov. 17 – Sean Michaels, Us Conductors
Dec. 1 – Lee Maracle, Celia’s Song
Jan. 12 – Heather O’Neill, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night
Jan. 26 – Gregory Scofield, Louis: The Heretic Poems
Feb. 9 – Colin McAdam, A Beautiful Truth
March 1 – Sue Goyette, Ocean
March 15 – Aisha Sasha John, Thou
For more information, email gailv@yorku.ca or leslie@yorku.ca.