Jeffrey Round is a Canadian writer, director, playwright, publisher, and songwriter, who has encouraged the development of LGBT literature, particularly in Canada. His published work includes literary fiction, plays, poetry and mystery novels.[1]
Jeffrey Round studied theatre, literature, psychology and music at Dalhousie University, obtaining a degree in English Literature. He also attended the Humber School for Writers, where he was mentored by writer DM Thomas, as well as Ryerson Polytechnical Institute's Film and Television program. In 1991, while working as an editor for Pink Triangle Press, he founded The Church-Wellesley Review, Canada's first annual print journal for LGBT creative writing, published as a supplement in Xtra! It later became both a reading series and an on-line quarterly, continuing until 2002. The review featured contributions from such notable writers as Jane Rule, Timothy Findley, Douglas LePan and Shyam Selvadurai, and introduced writers Dale Peck, Michael V Smith and Gordon Stewart Anderson among others.
From 1995 to 1998, Round directed Agatha Christie's long-running hit The Mousetrap during its twenty-seven record-breaking years at the Toronto Truck Theatre. In 1992 Round founded the multi-media theatre company Best Boys Productions with then-partner and gay activist John Davison. His first full-length stage play, Zebra, about the real-life murder of librarian Kenneth Zeller, won the Gay and Lesbian Appeal's "Right to Privacy Award" and was nominated for a Pink Trillium for Best Play. The pair produced five other stage works, including Dawn Rae Downton's Blessed and Round's The Michael Ridler Project (Is it art or still … life?), about out gay painter Michael Ridler.
In 2002, his short film My Heart Belongs to Daddy premiered at the Director's View Film Festival in Norwalk, Connecticut. It won awards for Best Canadian Director and Best Use of Music at the Hollywood North Movie Festival, and the Schweppes Prize at what would become the first annual Canadian Film Shorts festival. In 2005, Round was nominated for the KM Hunter Artists Award for Literature for "a body of work" that included fiction, poetry, drama, and literary criticism.
Round is the author of two mystery series featuring gay male protagonists. In 2007, Haworth published The P'Town Murders, the first Bradford Fairfax mystery. In 2012, Dundurn Press published the first Dan Sharp mystery, Lake On The Mountain, winner of the 2013 Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Mystery.[2]
In 2009, with Shane McConnell, Round began Proust & Company, a musical-literary evening at Glad Day Bookshop in Toronto to help raise awareness of the world's oldest existing LGBT bookstore. The event featured a cross-section of Canadian (mostly) LGBT writers and musicians, including poets Maureen Hines, RM Vaughan and Keith Garebian, novelists Elizabeth Ruth, John Miller, Storm Grant, Karen X Tulchinsky, and Zoe Whittall, essayist Michael Rowe, YA author Steven Bereznai, musicians Omel Masalunga, Geri Aniceto, Jamie Thompson and the Urban Flute Project, and others.
He served on the jury for the 2011 Dayne Ogilvie Prize, a literary award for emerging LGBT writers in Canada, selecting Farzana Doctor as that year's winner.[3]
In 2015, with Michael Erickson of Glad Day Bookshop, Round co-founded and co-named the Naked Heart LGBT Festival of Words, which became Canada's most racially diverse literary event. He has also served as the Ontario Representative for The Writers' Union of Canada.
Round has also worked as a producer and writer for Alliance-Atlantis and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. As a songwriter he has composed for, and performed and recorded with, acclaimed Canadian soprano Lilac Caña.
In addition, he has written about and credited such diverse cultural figures as Glenn Gould, Janis Joplin, John Lennon, Sylvia Plath, James Dean, Joni Mitchell, Tennessee Williams, Vincent van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anton Webern, Marcel Proust, Gabriel Fauré and William Shakespeare with the shaping of his creative vision.
A long-time resident of Toronto, he has also lived in London, England, and Milan, Italy.
Career as an author
Round's first novel, A Cage of Bones, was published by the Gay Men's Press in the UK. Based on Round's experiences as a fashion model in Italy and England, the book topped bestseller lists around the world. A comic mystery, The P-Town Murders, first in the Bradford Fairfax series, was published by Haworth Books in the US in 2007. Both titles were listed on AfterElton's Top 100 Greatest Gay Books in 2008.
In 2009, Cormorant Books released Death In Key West, the second Fairfax mystery. The Honey Locust, Round's literary novel about the Bosnian war, followed in the same year and was nominated for a ReLit Award for Literature.
In 2012, Dundurn Press published Lake on the Mountain, first in the Dan Sharp mystery series, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Mystery in 2013. The series, which focuses on gay private investigator Dan Sharp, continued with Pumpkin Eater (2014), The Jade Butterfly (2015) and After the Horses (2015), the latter garnering Round his second Lambda nomination.
In 2014, Round's poetry collection, In the Museum of Leonardo da Vinci, was published by Tightrope Books. It too received a ReLit nomination, this time for poetry. The book is dedicated to his father, who died before its publication.
Also in 2014, Round published Vanished in Vallarta, the third Bradford Fairfax mystery, under his own publishing imprint, which in 2008 published the revised second edition of A Cage of Bones after retrieving the rights from GMP.
In 2016, Dundurn published Round's Endgame, a total rewriting and recreation of Agatha Christie's bestselling mystery And Then There Were None. It became one of Dundurn's bestselling US titles, bringing Round new accolades from such writers as Joan Barfoot, who, in her IFP review of June 15, 2016, called him one of Dame Agatha's "putative heirs."
In 2016, Round signed a three-book deal with Dundurn to continue his successful run of Dan Sharp mysteries. These include The God Game, Shadow Puppet and Collateral. There are numerous other projects in the works, including Bon Ton Roulez, the fourth volume in the Bradford Fairfax series.
Theatre work
In 1992, Round co-founded Best Boys Productions, an experimental theatre company, together with John Davison. The company was in operation for five years and produced, among other works, Round's Right to Privacy Award-winning play, Zebra, about the murder of Toronto librarian Kenneth Zeller in High Park in 1985. At the same time, Round was the stage director for Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, Canada's longest-running stage production, at the Toronto Truck Theatre.
Film work
Round wrote and directed the short film My Heart Belongs to Daddy in 2003. He has also released two documentary films, BLOSSOM: A Portrait of Lilac Caña (2009) and Driving With Rusty (2010), a film about the late Rusty Ryan.
Aria (The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, Issue No. 20)
Autumn Lessons (The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, Issue No. 34)
Friends; Father (The New Quarterly, Vol. XVII, no. 3, Fall 1997)
Arrangements (Paperplates, Vol. 4 no. 1 Spring 2000 (web))
Burning, remembering – 6 Dec '91 ((EX)CITE Journal of Contemporary Writing, Premiere Issue, Spring 2001)
Small Furies (Canadian Literature, No. 182, Autumn 2004)
Six poems: Humpback, Dissolve, Flown, Beggar, midstream, Bloor Line, North Beach CA (Maple Tree Literary Supplement (Issue #2) edited by Amatoritsero Ede)
The One In The Mirror (for Trent Hurry) (Q Review, Dec 2010)
Rebel (On reviewing Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause) (I found It at the Movies: An Anthology of Film Poems, Coach House Books, Ruth Roach Pierson, editor, 2014)
In the Museum of Leonardo da Vinci (Tightrope Books, 2014)
Anthologies
"A Perfect Time to Be in Paris" in Bend Sinister (Peter Burton, ed. GMP-UK, 2002.)
"Queen for a Day" in Bent on Writing (Elizabeth Ruth, ed. Canadian Scholars Press, 2002)
"Isle of Women" in A Casualty of War: The Arcadia Book of Gay Short Stories (Peter Burton, ed. Arcadia Books, 2008)
"Don Juan and the Queen of the Gypsies" in Don Juan and Men (Caro Soles, ed. MLR Press, 2009)
"Mouse" in Men of the Mean Streets (G. Herren/J.D. Redman, eds. Bold Strokes, 2011)
"Rebel (On reviewing Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause)" in I found It at the Movies: An Anthology of Film Poems (Ruth Roach Pierson, ed. Coach House Books, 2014)
"Speak My Language" in Speak My Language and Other Stories (Torsten Hojer, ed. Little Brown UK, 2015)
Filmography
My Heart Belongs to Daddy (2003)
BLOSSOM: A Portrait of Lilac Caña (2009)
Driving With Rusty (2010)
Related Research Articles
Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End of London since 1952. A writer during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", Christie has been called the "Queen of Crime"—a moniker which is now trademarked by her estate—or the "Queen of Mystery". She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for her contributions to literature. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.
Lambda Literary Awards, also known as the "Lammys", are awarded yearly by Lambda Literary to recognize the crucial role LGBTQ writers play in shaping the world. The Lammys celebrate the very best in LGBTQ literature. The awards were instituted in 1989.
Rita Mae Brown is an American feminist writer, best known for her coming-of-age autobiographical novel, Rubyfruit Jungle. Brown was active in a number of civil rights campaigns and criticized the marginalization of lesbians within feminist groups. Brown received the Pioneer Award for lifetime achievement at the Lambda Literary Awards in 2015.
Alyson Books, formerly known as Alyson Publications, was a book publishing house which specialized in LGBT fiction and non-fiction. Former publisher Don Weise described it as "the world's oldest and largest publisher of LGBT literature" and "the home of award-winning books in the areas of memoir, history, humor, commercial fiction, mystery, and erotica, among many others".
Katherine V. Forrest is a Canadian-born American writer, best known for her novels about lesbian police detective Kate Delafield. Her books have won and been finalists for Lambda Literary Award twelve times, as well as other awards. She has been referred to by some "a founding mother of lesbian fiction writing."
Bella Books is a small press publisher of lesbian literature based in Tallahassee, Florida.
Ellen Hart is the award-winning mystery author of the Jane Lawless and Sophie Greenway series. Born in Maine, she was a professional chef for 14 years. Hart's mysteries include culinary elements similar to those of Diane Mott Davidson.
Lesbian literature is a subgenre of literature addressing lesbian themes. It includes poetry, plays, fiction addressing lesbian characters, and non-fiction about lesbian-interest topics. A similar term is sapphic literature, encompassing works that feature love between women that are not necessarily lesbian.
Zoe Whittall is a Canadian poet, novelist and TV writer. She has published five novels and three poetry collections to date.
Farzana Doctor is a Canadian novelist and social worker.
Amber Dawn is a Canadian writer, who won the 2012 Dayne Ogilvie Prize, presented by the Writers' Trust of Canada to an emerging lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender writer.
Richard Labonté was a Canadian writer and editor, best known as the editor or co-editor of numerous anthologies of LGBT literature.
Dirk Vanden, was an American author and illustrator. He is considered the first gay Mormon writer and has been called a "pioneer of gay literature" by the Lambda Literary Review. A graduate of the University of Utah, his work appeared in ONE Magazine, Vector, and California Scene, as well as in Latter-Gay Saints: An Anthology of Gay Mormon Fiction. His novel I Want It All was the first book to explore San Francisco's leather subculture. His greatest success was his All trilogy: I Want It All,All or Nothing, and All Is Well. Vanden received a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Erotica in 2012 for the revision of this trilogy, All Together.
Garry Ryan is a Canadian writer. Best known for his Detective Lane series of mystery novels, he has also published works of historical fiction.
Raziel Reid is a Canadian writer whose debut young adult novel When Everything Feels Like the Movies won the Governor General's Award for English-language children's literature at the 2014 Governor General's Awards. The novel, inspired in part by the 2008 murder of gay teenager Lawrence Fobes King, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2014. Its launch was marked with a national book tour with Vivek Shraya, who was simultaneously promoting her new book She of the Mountains. In 2015, Reid became adjunct professor of Creative Writing for Children and Young Adults at the University of British Columbia.
Warren Dunford is a Canadian writer, who published three comedic mystery novels in the 1990s and 2000s. All three novels centred on Mitchell Draper, a gay aspiring screenwriter and amateur detective plunged into unusual criminal investigations in the film industries of both Toronto and Hollywood.
Lev Raphael is an American writer of Jewish heritage. He has published work in a variety of genres, including literary fiction, murder mysteries, fantasy, short stories, memoir and non-fiction, and is known for being one of the most prominent LGBT figures in contemporary Jewish American literature. He is one of the first American-Jewish writers to publish fiction about children of Holocaust survivors, beginning to do so in 1978.
Caro Soles is a Canadian author of science fiction, mystery and erotica literature, who has published work both in her own name and under the pen name Kyle Stone.
Bisexual literature is a subgenre of LGBT literature that includes literary works and authors that address the topic of bisexuality or biromanticism. This includes characters, plot lines, and/or themes portraying bisexual behavior in both men and women.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
