Award-winning writer Karen Connelly is the fifth annual writer-in-residence at UBC’s Okanagan campus.
Sponsored by the department and faculty of creative and critical studies, this program allows 16 selected local writers to get free critiques of their work with Connelly.
The author of nine books of best-selling nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, Connelly’s most recent book, Burmese Lessons, is a memoir and love story about her experiences in Burma and on the Thai-Burma border.
She has won the Pat Lowther Award for her poetry, the Governor General’s Award for her non-fiction, and Britain’s Orange Broadband Prize for New Fiction for her first novel The Lizard Cage. Published in 2005, The Lizard Cage was compared in the New York Times Book Review to the works of Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, and Mandela, and hailed in The Globe and Mail as “one of the best modern Canadian novels.”
Connelly’s other books include Grace and Poison, One Room in a Castle, This Brighter Prison, The Disorder of Love, and The Small Words in My Body.
Married with a young child, she divides her time between a home in rural Greece and a home in Toronto.
Connelly will spend two weeks on UBC’s Okanagan campus from Jan. 23 to Feb. 3, 2012. Besides meeting with local writers, she will meet with various UBC creative writing classes.
Writers in the Central Okanagan are invited to have their work critiqued and to participate in a one-on-one meeting with Connelly. Appointments are limited to 16, with six of the 16 spaces reserved for UBC Okanagan campus students.
Those interested in submitting their work can email irma.ronkkonen@ubc.ca with a maximum of 15 double-spaced pages of their fiction (plus a one-page synopsis if it is an excerpt from a longer work.) Include writer in residence in the subject line, as well as name, student number (if applicable), phone number, and email address.
Submissions will be accepted between Dec. 15 and Jan. 3.
