Best-selling author, Alissa York, reads at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre next Friday, May 31, at 9 p.m. York's reading concludes the S.C. Arts Council's spring reading series.
York's spoken and written words command attention. Canada's foremost literary magazine, Quill & Quire, proclaimed her most recent book, Fauna, "An extraordinary noveldaring and exceptional."
It is certainly unusual, for Fauna takes us to the urban forest of Toronto's Don Valley, and "reminds us," in the words of Annabel Lyon, "of the life that swoops and slithers and lopes and pounces all around us, even in the most urban of worlds; a wild life we share and ignore at our peril."
York's novel, Effigy, short-listed for the Scotia Bank Giller prize, has been described as "almost frighteningly real."
Of her own writing, York has said, "I'm drawn to writing about people with their insides showing."
For York, it was a "life-changing trip" that she and four other writers took to Torngat Mountains National Park in 2011 with Shelagh Rogers and the Northwords film crew, as part of a cross platform production with FilmCan, CBC, and Anansi Press. Rogers and Noah Richler presented an introduction to Northwords in Sechelt last summer as a prelude to the 2012 Festival of the Written Arts.
A first for the Arts Council series, York's reading also marks a collaboration with Coast Cultural Alliance, representing for them the Spoken Word event that annually concludes the Artesia Coffeehouse season.
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