Anne Michaels
Anne Michaels | |
---|---|
Skin Divers, Correspondences | |
Website | www |
Anne Michaels (born 15 April 1958) is a Canadian poet and novelist whose work has been translated and published in over 45 countries. Her books have garnered dozens of international awards including the
Early life
Anne Michaels was born in Toronto, Ontario, in 1958. She attended Vaughan Road Academy and then later the University of Toronto, where she is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of English.
Career
With her first two poetry collections, The Weight of Oranges and Miner's Pond, Michaels gained attention as a writer who balances technical precision with profound meditation and humanity.[1] The recipient of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas and the Canadian Authors' Association Award, and a finalist for both the Governor General's Award and the Trillium Award, Michaels secured her place among the finest Canadian poets early in her career.[2]
Following her early success with poetry, Michaels found herself "bumping up more frequently against its limits. [She] was pushing the form as far as [she] could in longer pieces, trying to make connections on a larger scale. [She] stretched poetry as far as it would go in terms of length." Her debut novel, Fugitive Pieces (1996), offered Michaels the opportunity to work more expansively with complicated questions related to history, identity, location, and grief: "a way of layering things; of having images and gestures that connect between page 100 and page 303. It [gave her] the chance to bring readers in slowly, via as many strands as [she could]."[3]
With Fugitive Pieces, Michaels lays the thematic foundation of her future works, exploring the relationship between history and memory, and how we, as a people, remember. She also launches her meditation on "what love makes us capable of, and incapable of," and the paradoxical understanding that "there is nothing a man will not do to another; nothing a man will not do for another." Confronting the horrors of war, violence, dislocation, and loss through her writing, Michaels "travels with the reader through terrain that is philosophically, morally and emotionally perilous" and refuses to publish unless she can "in some way deliver the reader and [herself] to the other side." She writes: "We don't need repeated proof of violence or horror - a single incident convinces us - but we do need proof, again and again, of the strength, the power, the reach, and the consequences of love."
Fugitive Pieces, the story of a holocaust survivor trying to find his way back into the world, went on to be critically acclaimed internationally, winning the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Trillium Book Award, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, the Heritage Toronto Award of Merit, the Martin and Beatrice Fischer Award, the Harold Ribalow Award, the Giuseppe Acerbi Literary Award and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize.
While working on her second novel,
During this period, Michaels also began writing for the stage. A collaboration with
Michaels would not publish The Winter Vault until 2009, thirteen years following the release of Fugitive Pieces which, likewise, took nearly a decade to write. Like Fugitive Pieces, her second novel considers deeply the "complicated relationship between huge historic events and intimate, domestic events; the relationship between historical grief and personal grief; how we remember privately, and how we remember - and memorialize – publicly, collectively. Each community, each nation, faces this question and answers it in its own way, according to its own needs."
Connecting three historic events - the dismantling and reconstruction of Egypt's Abu Simbel Temple; the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway in Canada and the drowning of towns, villages and graves; and the rebuilding of Warsaw after World War II - the novel considers whether a temple, taken apart stone by stone and rebuilt, is the same temple; a river barraged, the same river; a city reconstructed, the same city; and whether the heart can be repaired and rebuilt after a profound personal loss. The Winter Vault went on to garner international praise and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Trillium Book Award and the Commonwealth Prize, and was also long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award.
In 2011, Michaels contributed to the
Michaels returned to poetry with the release of her book-length poem, Correspondences (2013), an historic and personal elegy in an accordion-style format that can be read frontwards or backwards. A collaboration with artist Bernice Eisenstein, Correspondences alternates poetry with haunting portraits of the 20th century writers and thinkers to whom Michaels' pays tribute. The work went on to receive the Helen and Stan Vine Book Award and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize.[8]
In October 2015, Michaels began her tenure as the poet laureate of Toronto, succeeding George Elliott Clarke.[9] Her personal mandate is to provide a platform for Toronto's many tongues: "How do we make a space for all these literatures that have come to us in such tremendous largesse, such tremendous richness? We need Torontonians to bring their cultures, bring their poets to us, so we have access to that huge international library."[10] 2015 also saw the release of Michaels' first children's book, The Adventures of Miss Petitfour, with its follow-up, The Further Adventures of Miss Petitfour, being released in 2022.
In 2017, a new collection of poetry, All We Saw, and a new work of non-fiction, Infinite Gradation (with afterword by poet Gareth Evans) were published. Both books were shortlisted for the 2019 Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature in the Poetry and Non-Fiction categories respectively.[11] Infinite Gradation won the Non-Fiction prize.[12]
Michaels published her third novel, Held, in November 2023.
In 2023, she was elected as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer[13]
Publications
Poetry collections
Year | Title | Awards | Result |
---|---|---|---|
1986 | The Weight of Oranges | Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas | Winner |
1991 | Miner's Pond | Canadian Authors' Association Award | Winner |
Governor General's Award | Finalist | ||
Trillium Award | Finalist | ||
1999 | Skin Divers | ||
2000 | Poems | ||
2011 | Railtracks | ||
2013 | Correspondences | Helen and Stan Vine Book Award | Winner |
Griffin Poetry Prize | Shortlist | ||
2017 | All We Saw |
Novels
Year | Title | Awards | Result |
---|---|---|---|
1996 | Fugitive Pieces | Orange Prize for Fiction | Winner |
Guardian Fiction Prize | Winner | ||
Lannan Literary Award for Fiction | Winner | ||
15th Anniversary Orange Prize Youth Panel Award | Winner | ||
Trillium Book Award | Winner | ||
Books in Canada First Novel Award | Winner | ||
City of Toronto Book Award | Winner | ||
Heritage Toronto Award of Merit | Winner | ||
Martin and Beatrice Fischer Award | Winner | ||
Harold Ribalow Award | Winner | ||
Giuseppe Acerbi Literary Award | Winner | ||
Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize | Winner | ||
Scotiabank Giller Prize | Shortlist | ||
International Dublin Literary Award | Longlist | ||
Canadian Booksellers Association Author of the Year Award | Finalist | ||
2009 | The Winter Vault | Scotiabank Giller Prize | Shortlist |
Trillium Book Award | Finalist | ||
Commonwealth Writers' Prize | Finalist | ||
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award | Longlist | ||
2023 | Held |
Other selected works
- The Passion of Lavinia Andronicus (2005)
- Vanishing Points (2005)
- Sixty-Six Books (2011)
- Sea of Lanterns (2012)
- The Adventures of Miss Petitfour (2015)
- Infinite Gradation (2017)
- The Further Adventures of Miss Petitfour (2022)
Adaptations
Fugitive Pieces was directed and adapted for the screen by Jeremy Podeswa, scored by Nikos Kypourgos, and selected to open the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. Michaels' debut novel was also adapted into a radio drama for BBC Radio 3.[14]
Skin Divers was adapted in 2009 for the National Ballet of Canada by Dominique Dumais with music by Gavin Bryars. Incorporating spoken word and visual projections, Skin Divers explores "the body as a living archive of experience, or a museum of memory."[15]
References
- ^ The Kingston Whig-Standard Review of Miner's Pond
- ^ Vancouver Sun Review of Miner's Pond
- ^ ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2017-01-28.
- ^ Complicite. "Complicite - Vanishing Points". www.complicite.org. Retrieved 2017-01-30.
- ^ "Soundmakers - The Passion of Lavinia Andronicus by Omar Daniel". www.soundmakers.ca. Archived from the original on 2017-02-02. Retrieved 2017-01-30.
- ^ "Sixty-Six Books". www.bushtheatre.co.uk. Retrieved 2017-01-30.
- ^ "Westminster Abbey Official Press Release".
- ^ "Griffin Poetry Prize | Anne Michaels". Griffin Poetry Prize. Retrieved 2017-01-30.
- ^ "Anne Michaels is Toronto's new poet laureate". Toronto Star, October 14, 2015.
- ^ Rider, David (14 October 2015). "New poet laureate Anne Michaels will focus on Toronto's many tongues | Toronto Star". thestar.com. Retrieved 2017-01-30.
- ^ "Toronto poet Anne Michaels nominated for two 2019 Vine Awards". Toronto Star. September 27, 2019.
- CBC Books.
- ^ "RSL International Writers | 2023 International Writers". Royal Society of Literature. 3 September 2023. Retrieved 3 December 2023.
- ^ Fugitive Pieces Pt. 1, retrieved 2017-01-30
- ^ "National Ballet of Canada - Skin Divers Programme".