The Michael Ondaatje Reading Series presents Susan Swan

When:
March 1, 2016 @ 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm
2016-03-01T16:30:00-05:00
2016-03-01T18:30:00-05:00
Where:
Glendon Campus York University
Senior Common Room
Contact:
416-7362100 ext 88175

Susan Swan

Susan Swan burst onto the literary scene in Canada with her concept novel The Biggest Modern Woman in the World, in 1983. It was an audacious book with shocking yet delicately handled feminism and established Swan as a formidable literary contender. It 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. It was among the first novels in Canadian literature to be set in cottage country Ontario. Regionalism has been a continuing theme in her work, and continues right up to her most recent work, The Western Light.

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. (Years later, in 2001, a film based on The Wives of Bath was produced under the title Lost and Delirious. It went on to show in 32 countries as well as being picked as a Premier Selection film at Sundance and the Berlin Film Festival in 2001.)

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. “In its inventive range, its playful engagement and tantalizing mystery, What Casanova Told Me is breathtaking, a tour de force that detonates echoes of the past within the present. Utterly seductive. The lesson learned here is simple: Leave home, fall in love and believe in the accidents of pleasure and freedom.” Globe & Mail, 2004

Most recently, in 2012, she published The Western Light, a Canadian bestseller that is a prequel to The Wives of Bath. Here she returns to familiar territory to tell an epic and very Canadian story of love and hardship. Susan Swan, a one-time chair of the Writer’s Union of Canada (2007-2008), is also a retired faculty member of York University. A journalist, feminist and political activist, Susan Swans’ impact on the Canadian literary and political scene has been far-reaching.