Published by Communications and Public Affairs (519) 824-4120, Ext. 56982 or 53338
News Release
March 12, 2004
U of G Governor General Award nominee launches new book
University of Guelph professor Stephen Henighan, a 2002 Governor General’s award nominee, is embarking on a national book tour to launch his new novel, The Streets of Winter.
Henighan will launch the book in Montreal, the city in which the book is set, April 2 at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival, one of the most important literary festivals in the world. A Guelph launch will take place March 20 at 2:30 p.m. in The Bookshelf.
“The Streets of Winter is about reinventing your identity in the city, about language and communication, and about the struggle for control of a dilapidated apartment building,” said Henighan. “I wrote it out of years of working at a wide range of jobs in a variety of Montreal neighbourhoods.”
Henighan lived in Montreal for eight years completing his MA in Creative Writing at Concordia University and working as a freelance writer. To make ends meet during that time, he worked as an ESL teacher, in a steel-cutting plant and as a mail box assembler for Canada Post.
“My experiences in different parts of the city contradicted each other so strikingly that only fiction could make sense of the discrepancies,” he said.
The novel takes place in the Notre-Dame-Grace and the Plateau Mont-Royal neigbourhoods in the 1980s and is centred around eight characters, including a young entrepreneur, a women blinded to life by her search for art, an intellectual, an immigrant and a homeless teenager.
Throughout the spring, Henighan will discuss The Streets of Winter at the Great Ontario Book Bash in Toronto (April 4), the University of Calgary (April 6), Pages Books on Kensington in Calgary (April 7), "This Is Not A Reading Series" at the Rivoli in Toronto (April 14), the University of Toronto bookstore reading series (May 4), St. Catharines Public Library (May 6), the University of Manitoba (June 1) and McNally Robinson Books in Saskatoon (June 3).
Henighan teaches Spanish-American literature and culture in the school of languages and literatures. He was a 2003 judge for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and is a regular reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement.
His 2003 book Lost Province: Adventures in a Moldovan Family captures how political changes had affected the lives of a family he lived with while teaching English in the former U.S.S.R. country. When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing, which received a Governor General’s award nomination for non-fiction, is a collection of essays that examine the impact of free trade and globalization on Canadian literature in the 1990s. His other novels include Other Americas and The Places Where Names Vanish. His short fiction has been published in more than 30 journals and anthologies in Canada, the U.S., Great Britain and Europe.
Contact:
Stephen Henighan
School of Languages and Literatures
University of Guelph
(519) 824-4120, Ext. 54489 or shenigha@uoguelph.ca
For media questions, contact Communications and Public Affairs: Lori Bona Hunt (519) 824-4120, Ext. 53338, or Rachelle Cooper, (519) 824-4120, Ext. 56982.
