The Underpainter is a novel by Jane Urquhart that won the 1997 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, and in the same year was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. [1]
The story takes place mainly in Canada and the United States in the early years of the 20th century. [2] The main character and narrator, Austin Fraser (the "underpainter" of the title) is a successful artist, and the plot mostly concerns his relationship with a waitress he uses as a model and how his art reflects his dislike for human contact. [3]
Fraser meets the waitress, Sara Pengelly, when he leaves his native USA to spend the summer in Silver Islet Landing; but he declines to form a permanent attachment to her, finding her an embarrassment on the rare occasions they meet her outside her normal environment. The book begins as Fraser, now an old man, hears of Sara's death. The remainder of the narrative deals with his past history.
Fraser's only real friend, George Kearns, a painter of ceramics, commits suicide in 1937, along with his lover, Augusta, after they have confided in Fraser about their experiences during the First World War. Fraser, who is present in the house and finds the couple dead, is moved by the experience. He returns to Silver Islet, hoping for comfort from Sara, only to reject her at the last moment.
Jane Urquhart, LL.D is a Canadian novelist and poet. She is the internationally acclaimed author of seven award-winning novels, three books of poetry and numerous short stories. As a novelist, Urquhart is well known for her evocative style which blends history with the present day. Her first novel, The Whirlpool, gained her international recognition when she became the first Canadian to win France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger. Her subsequent novels were even more successful. Away, published in 1993, won the Trillium Award and was a national bestseller. In 1997, her fourth novel, The Underpainter, won the Governor General's Literary Award.
John Lent is a Canadian poet and novelist, as well as a college teacher of creative writing and literature. He has published ten books from 1978 to 2012. His book, So It Won't Go Away, was shortlisted for the 2006 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Lent's fiction and poetry have appeared for years in magazines across Canada, including: The Malahat Review, Event, Dandelion, Grain, The Wascana Review, NeWest Review, Prairie Fire, CV2, New Quarterly, Waves, Matrix, The Fiddlehead, and The Antigonish Review. Lent has read from his work in many cities in Canada, and internationally. Lent has also published critical articles on the work of Malcolm Lowry, Thomas DeQuincey, Wyndham Lewis, Tom Wayman, Kristjana Gunnars, Mavis Gallant, Dennis Brutus and Wilfred Watson.
Alice Ann Munro was a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Her work tends to move forward and backward in time, with integrated short story cycles.
Don's Plum is a 2001 black-and-white independent drama film directed by R. D. Robb, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Kevin Connolly. It was filmed in 1995–1996, and written by Robb with Bethany Ashton, Tawd Beckman, David Stutman and Dale Wheatley. The film takes place over the course of one night in which a group of young adults discuss life while eating at a diner.
Southern Ontario Gothic is a subgenre of the Gothic novel genre and a feature of Canadian literature that comes from Southern Ontario. This region includes Toronto, Southern Ontario's major industrial cities, and the surrounding countryside. While the genre may also feature other areas of Ontario, Canada, and the world as narrative locales, this region provides the core settings.
Silver Islet refers to both a small rocky island and a small community located at the tip of the Sibley Peninsula in northwestern Ontario, Canada.
Nightfall is a 1956 American crime film noir directed by Jacques Tourneur and starring Aldo Ray, Brian Keith and Anne Bancroft.
Alexander McPhee Miller is an Australian novelist. Miller is twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award, in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He won the overall award for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for The Ancestor Game in 1993. He is twice winner of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize for Conditions of Faith in 2001 and for Lovesong in 2011. In recognition of his impressive body of work and in particular for his novel Autumn Laing he was awarded the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2012.
Fugitive Pieces is a novel by the Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels. The story is divided into two sections. The first centers around Jakob Beer, a Polish Holocaust survivor, while the second involves a man named Ben, the son of two Holocaust survivors. It was first published in Canada in 1996 and was published in the United Kingdom the following year. The novel has won awards such as Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, Orange Prize for Fiction, Guardian Fiction Prize and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize. It was on Canada's bestseller list for more than two years and has been translated into over 20 different languages.
The Stone Carvers (2001) is a novel by the Canadian writer Jane Urquhart, focusing on the historical events of World War I, and the fictional town of Shoneval, Ontario.
Sara Beth Bareilles is an American singer, songwriter, and actress. She has sold over three million albums and over 15 million singles in the United States. Bareilles has earned various accolades, including two Grammy Awards, as well as nominations for three Primetime Emmy Awards and three Tony Awards. In 2012, VH1 named her one of the Top 100 Greatest Women in Music.
Sara Jeannette Duncan was a Canadian author and journalist, who also published as Mrs. Everard Cotes and Garth Grafton among other names. First trained as a teacher in a normal school, she took to poetry early in life and after a brief teaching period worked as a travel writer for Canadian newspapers and a columnist for the Toronto Globe. Afterward she wrote for the Washington Post where she was put in charge of the current literature section. Later she made a journey to India and married an Anglo-Indian civil servant thereafter dividing her time between England and India. She wrote 22 works of fiction, many with international themes and settings. Her novels met with mixed acclaim and are rarely read today. In 2016, she was named a National Historic Person on the advice of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada.
Sara Gruen is Canadian-American author. She is a 2007 recipient of the Alex Award for young adult literature.
Deborah Ellis is a Canadian fiction writer and activist. Her themes are often concerned with the sufferings of persecuted children in the Third World.
Clara Callan is a novel by Canadian writer Richard B. Wright, published in 2001. It is the story of a woman in her thirties living in Ontario during the 1930s and is written in epistolary form, utilizing letters and journal entries to tell the story. The protagonist, Clara, faces the struggles of being a single woman in a rural community in the early 20th century. The novel won the Governor General's Award in the English fiction category, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Trillium Book Award.
Anthony Morse Urquhart, LL.D. was a Canadian painter. He was recognized in the late 1950s and early 1960s as one of Canada's pioneering abstractionists, having been variously linked with the Toronto painters associated with The Isaacs Gallery and The Heart of London group that included Jack Chambers, Greg Curnoe and Murray Favro.
The House That Would Not Die is a 1970 American made-for-television supernatural horror film starring Barbara Stanwyck, Richard Egan, Michael Anderson Jr. and Kitty Winn. It premiered as the ABC Movie of the Week on October 27, 1970.
Ellen Jane Seligman was an American-Canadian editor and publisher. She was a member of the Order of Ontario, the highest honour in the Canadian province of Ontario, and twice won the Canadian Booksellers Association Editor of the Year Award.
The Whirlpool, originally published in Toronto by McClelland and Stewart in 1986, is Canadian author Jane Urquhart's first novel. It was subsequently published in the United Kingdom by Simon and Schuster, in the US by David R. Godine, and in translation in France by Maurice Nadeau. It was the first Canadian novel to be awarded France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 1992, and was afterward published in several other European countries.
Emily Urquhart is a Canadian writer. She is most noted for her 2022 book Ordinary Wonder Tales, which was a shortlisted finalist for the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.