Susan Swan, who in 1983 burst onto the literary scene in Canada with her concept novel The Biggest Modern Woman in the World, will headline the March 1 Michael Ondaatje Reading Series event at Glendon College.
The series is sponsored by Ondaatje – who taught English literature for a number of years at Glendon – and by Glendon’s Department of English. It brings contemporary Canadian writers and poets to Glendon to read from their recent work and discuss the writing process. The lectures are free and open to the public. The March 1 event runs 4 to 6pm in the Senior Common Room.
Susan Swan, a one-time chair of the Writer’s Union of Canada (2007-08), is also a retired faculty member of York University. A journalist, feminist and political activist, Swan’s impact on the Canadian literary and political scene has been far-reaching.
The Biggest Modern Woman in the World was nominated for both the Governor General’s Award and the Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her erotically charged novel The Last of the Golden Girls, published in 1989, followed this first novel. In 1993, she published The Wives of Bath, “a darkly humorous tale about a murder in a girl’s boarding school” which drew upon her own experience as a young woman attending Havergal College in Toronto. It was nominated for both the UK’s Guardian Fiction Prize and the Ontario Trillium Book Award.
In 1996, she published a collection of short stories entitled Stupid Boys are Good to Relax With, and in 2004 she published her next novel, What Casanova Told Me. Most recently, in 2012, she published The Western Light, a Canadian bestseller that is a prequel to The Wives of Bath.
For more on this event, or the series, call Patricia Munoz at 416-736-2100 ext. 88175.