John Bemrose is a Canadian arts journalist, novelist, poet and playwright. [1] His arts reviews have appeared in Maclean's , [2] The Globe and Mail , the National Post and on CBC Radio.
Bemrose was born and raised in Paris, Ontario, [3] where his father, Fred Bemrose, a 2009 recipient of the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement, remains the town historian. He graduated from the Victoria University in the University of Toronto in 1970, where he published early poems in Acta Victoriana. [4] [5]
His debut novel, The Island Walkers, was published in 2003. [6] It was a nominee for that year's Giller Prize, as well as making the longlist for the Man Booker Prize.
He has also published a play, Mother Moon, and two volumes of poetry.[ citation needed ]
His second novel, The Last Woman, was published in 2009 by McClelland & Stewart. It is set in Ontario's cottage country and is being touted by its publisher as a vehicle for the vivid characterizations for which he's become known.
The Times Literary Supplement said in a review of The Island Walkers: "Bemrose’s characters […] live as real people live: contradictory, capable of kindness and disdain, of near-simultaneous love and hate, of gross betrayal…." [7]
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The Giller Prize is a literary award given to a Canadian author of a novel or short story collection published in English the previous year, after an annual juried competition between publishers who submit entries. The prize was established in 1994 by Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch in honour of his late wife Doris Giller, a former literary editor at the Toronto Star, and is awarded in November of each year along with a cash reward with the winner being presented by the previous year's winning author.
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Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized the terms Generation X and McJob. He has published 13 novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. He is a columnist for the Financial Times, as well as a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux journal, DIS Magazine, and Vice. His art exhibits include Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything, which was exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, now the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto Canada, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, as well as the Villa Stuck.
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Yann Martel, is a Canadian author who wrote the Man Booker Prize–winning novel Life of Pi, an international bestseller published in more than 50 territories. It has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and spent more than a year on the bestseller lists of the New York Times and The Globe and Mail, among many other best-selling lists. Life of Pi was adapted for a movie directed by Ang Lee, garnering four Oscars including Best Director and winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.
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Richard Wagamese was an Ojibwe Canadian author and journalist from the Wabaseemoong Independent Nations in Northwestern Ontario. He was best known for his novel Indian Horse (2012), which won the Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature in 2013, and was a competing title in the 2013 edition of Canada Reads.
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