Lynn Coady
With four critically acclaimed books under her belt, Vancouver-based Lynn Coady is being touted as one of Canada's hottest young authors.
The "quality of compassion" about all the characters in one of her latest literary endeavours, Saints of Big Harbour (2002), "on top of narrative skill and assured characterization" gives the novel "distinction," declared a review in London's The Observer.
Set in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where Coady was raised, Saints of Big Harbour is, as The Observer explained, "a small-town story of ennui, addiction, failure, cowardice and violence," told through the eyes of an "awkward" adolescent boy raised by his "well-meaning but exhausted" mother, according to another reviewer.
While Observer critic Arnold Kemp suggested Saints of Big Harbour "confirms" Coady's arrival as a "major" literary talent, her star started shining with her first novel. Strange Heaven (1998), also set in Cape Breton, earned her several awards, including a spot on the shortlist for the Governor General's Award for Fiction.
Her latest book and third novel, Mean Boy (2003), this time set in New Brunswick, is, in the author's own words, "about poets, ambition, class, ego, magic mushrooms, small towns and academia" in the seventies.
Coady, who has a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and who has written several plays, also uses her pen as a journalist through an arts and culture column that appears regularly in The Globe and Mail.
- Christopher Guly