Playing with Real People - Kate Braid, Annabel Lyon & Thomas Trofimuk
Christopher Columbus, Aristotle and Alexander the Great, and Glenn Gould: real people whose lives have been poured over by countless historians and biographers. So how does a writer of fiction who elects to write about such well-known figures begin to distill fact from myth? Thomas Trofimuk (Waiting for Columbus), Annabel Lyon (The Golden Mean) and Kate Braid (A Well-Mannered Storm: The Glenn Gould Poems) all encountered this challenge. In this discussion they share how they learned to read the cues right, to come to the end of their research and see the blank canvass before them.
Thomas Trofimuk's Waiting for Columbus, Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean and Kate Braid's A Well-Mannered Storm: The Glenn Gould Poems are all available from your local independent bookseller or online at these retailers:
Trofimuk
Lyon
Braid
Kate Braid has published the biography Emily Carr: Rebel Artist and five books of poetry: Covering Rough Ground, which won the Pat Lowther Award, To This Cedar Fountain, nominated for the BC Poetry Book Prize, Inward to the Bones: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Journey with Emily Carr, winner of the Vancity Book Prize, A Well-Mannered Storm: The Glenn Gould Poems and, most recently, Turning Left to the Ladies. She also co-edited In Fine Form: The Canadian Anthology of Form Poetry. (APRIL 2010)
Annabel Lyon’s first short-story collection, Oxygen, was nominated for the Danuta Gleed and ReLit awards. Her second, The Best Thing for You, was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction. In addition to creative writing, Lyon has studied music, philosophy and law. The Golden Mean is her first novel for adults and has been shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Governor-General's Literary Award. (APRIL 2010)
Thomas Trofimuk is an Edmonton writer whose poems and short stories have been published in literary magazines and journals across the Canada, and broadcast on CBC Radio. His first novel, The 52nd Poem, won the 2003 Alberta Book of the Year Award and the City of Edmonton Book Prize. A second novel, Doubting Yourself to the Bone, was named as one of the top 100 must-read books for 2006 by the Globe and Mail. His new novel is Waiting for Columbus. (APRIL 2010)
