Elizabeth Hay (novelist)

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Elizabeth Hay
Elizabeth Hay signing her book Late Nights on Air at the Port Colborne Author Series
Elizabeth Hay signing her book Late Nights on Air at the Port Colborne Author Series
Born (1951-10-22) October 22, 1951 (age 72)
Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada
Occupationnovelist and short story writer
Alma materUniversity of Toronto
Periodcontemporary
Genrefiction
Notable worksLate Nights on Air, A Student of Weather, Small Change, Garbo Laughs, Alone in the Classroom, His Whole Life, All Things Consoled
Website
elizabethhay.com

Elizabeth Grace Hay (born October 22, 1951) is a Canadian novelist and short story writer.[1]

Her 2007 novel

Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Hay's memoir about the last years of her parents' lives, All Things Consoled, won the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Her most recent novel, Snow Road Station, was named one of the best books of 2023 by The New Yorker.[3]

In 2002, she received the

Marian Engel Award, presented by the Writers' Trust of Canada
to an established female writer for her body of work — including novels, short fiction, and creative non-fiction.

Life

Hay was born on October 22, 1951, in Owen Sound, Ontario.[4] She is the daughter of a high school principal and a painter. She spent a year in England when she was fifteen and later attended the University of Toronto.

In September, 1972, she quit university and a few months later travelled out west by train.[5] The following year she returned to Toronto and finished her degree in English and Philosophy. In 1974 she moved to Yellowknife, NWT. She worked for ten years as a CBC radio broadcaster in Yellowknife, Winnipeg and Toronto and then moved to Mexico, where she freelanced for the CBC. In 1986 she settled in New York City, and then returned to Canada in 1992 with her family. She lives in Ottawa with her husband Mark Fried, a literary translator. She has two children: a son, Ben, and a daughter, Sochi.[6]

Critical reputation and style

In an interview with the CBC in 2007, Hay commented on the relationship between her writing and her career in radio. "When I worked in Yellowknife," she said, "I was writing poetry and stories on the side and not getting very far. I felt kind of schizophrenic, like my radio work was one type of thing and my writing was another and there was a gap between. That became even more pronounced when I started working for CBC's Sunday Morning, doing radio documentaries. I took me a while to realize that there didn't need to be such a wide gap between those two forms of writing, and that they could cross-fertilize. Good radio writing is similar to any good writing. It's direct and economical and intimate and full of detail. Also, it sets your visual imagination working."[7]

Bibliography

Novels

Short story collections

Short stories

  • "The Friend" (in The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, edited by
    Penguin Canada
    )
  • "Jet in England", Ottawa Magazine summer fiction issue, Jul/Aug 2007
  • "The Food of Love", Ottawa Citizen, Holiday Edition, 2008
  • "Of Mattresses and Men", Ottawa Magazine summer fiction issue, July/Aug 2008
  • "Last Poems", The New Quarterly, Spring 2009
  • "City as Redhead", The New Quarterly, Spring 2009

Non-fiction

  • A non-fiction trilogy about Elizabeth Hay's travels outside of Canada:
  • All Things Consoled: a daughter's memoir (2018) McClelland & Stewart

Essays

  • "Ten Beauty Tips You Never Asked For" (in Dropped Threads 2, edited by
    Vintage Canada
    )
  • "The Most Fearless Book I Read" (in The Book I Read, edited by Peder Zane, 2004, Norton)
  • "My Debt to D.H. Lawrence" (in Writing Life: Celebrated Canadian and International Authors on Writing and Life, edited by Constance Rooke, 2006, McClelland & Stewart)
  • "Between Books" (in Finding the Words: Writers on Inspiration, Desire, War, Celebrity, Exile, and Breaking the Rules, edited by Jared Bland, 2011, McClelland & Stewart)
  • "The Mother as Material" (in The Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro, edited by David Staines, 2016, Cambridge UP)

Anthologies

  • Short Fiction, an Anthology, edited by Rosemary Sullivan and Mark Levene, Oxford University Press, 2003
  • The Scotiabank Giller Prize 15 Years: An Anthology of Prize-Winning Canadian Fiction, Penguin, 2008
  • Best Canadian Essays 2010, Tightrope Books, 2010

Prizes and honours

References

  1. ^ Elizabeth Hay's entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia
  2. ^ W. H. New, ed. Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002: 477.
  3. ^ The New Yorker, 6 December 2023
  4. ^ Elizabeth Hay's web site
  5. ^ January Magazine, June 2000
  6. ^ "Bio | Elizabeth Hay". elizabethhay.com. Retrieved 2017-12-21.
  7. ^ "An interview with Giller Prize winner Elizabeth Hay - CBC Arts | Books". 2008-01-12. Archived from the original on 2008-01-12. Retrieved 2021-05-23.
  8. ^ Wilfrid Laurier University 1993: Elizabeth Hay, retrieved 11/17/2012
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