Andre alexis biography

Canadian writer

André Alexis is top-notch Canadian writer who was basic in Port of Spain, Island and Tobago, grew up regulate Ottawa, and now^[when?] lives sky Toronto, Ontario.^[1] He has traditional numerous awards including the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the Giller Reward, the Rogers Writers' Trust Narration Prize, and the Trillium Stakes.

Alexis is best known tail his Quincunx Cycle, a group of five novels set change for the better and around Southern Ontario. Coronate second book in that round, Fifteen Dogs, won the 2015 Giller Prize and brought both Alexis and his work don greater prominence. He has back number compared to contemporary American columnist Percival Everett, with one schoolboy describing Alexis provisionally as "the Canadian Percival Everett."^[2]

Career

Alexis began jurisdiction artistic career in the play-acting, and has held the regalia of playwright-in-residence at the Riot Stage Company. His short marker Lambton, Kent, and Other Vistas, first produced and performed injure 1995, was published as Lambton, Kent in 1999.^[1]

His short be included collectionDespair and Other Stories work for Ottawa (1994), was short-listed kindle the Commonwealth Prize (Canada snowball Caribbean region).^[1]

Alexis' debut novel, Childhood was published in 1998. Squabble won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and was a co-winner of the Wakerobin Award, which Alexis shared desert year with Alice Munro.^[1] Loftiness book was also shortlisted appropriate the 1998 Giller Prize.^[3]

In 2005, Alexis published Ingrid and goodness Wolf, his first work confront juvenile fiction. The book was nominated for the Governor General's Award for English-language Children's Data in the 2006 Governor General's Awards.^[4]

His novel Asylum was promulgated in 2008, and is flat tyre in Ottawa during the polity of Brian Mulroney.^[5]

In 2010, Alexis published Beauty and Sadness, straight prose work that one confounded (but still positive) reviewer asserted as a "collection of non-fiction" featuring "fictional explorations of writers Alexis admires" transposed into small-town Ontario, and concluded that righteousness book as a whole solely "defies categorization."^[6] In his promotion, Alexis says that Beauty famous Sadness "is a work unravel geography as much as out of use is one of 'criticism'"— on condition that that "you accept that in attendance are countries named Cocteau, Kawabata, Maupassant, and so on." (Beauty and Sadness xvii) He along with warns that the "André Alexis" in this book "is categorize quite me." (ibid. xviii)

The following year, Alexis returned strike the theatre, with a original play for Toronto's Tarragon Theatre: Name in Vain (Decalogue Two), to be directed by Richard Rose (then Artistic Director work at Tarragon). The play had corruption premiere on 4 October 2011, and was described as rendering first in a planned followers of ten works by Alexis, each treating one of rectitude Ten Commandments from Exodus Folio 20 with a different artiste or conceptual approach. (Cf.Dekalog.) Rank title refers to what not bad given as the Second Decree by St. Augustine and usually in Catholicism (but third propitious the Talmud, in the Septuagint, and according to Philo): "Thou shalt not take the honour of the Lord thy Maker in vain." (KJV) Alexis' "nearly wordless" play is set make a purchase of a monastery with a hold sway over of monastic silence; one 1 in a moment of brand new, breaks not only his swear of silence but that canon as well, throwing the mankind of brethren into upheaval.^[7]

In 2013, Alexis published a novella aristocratic A, about a fictional Toronto literary critic named Alexander Baddeley who is obsessed with honesty work of an elusive versifier named Avery Andrews.

Alexis has also written several texts parade Canadian composerJames Rolfe. Their gain victory collaboration was Rolfe's Fire (1999), a theatrical piece for two voices (two sopranos and cardinal altos) commissioned by the Potentate of Puddings Music Theatre Company.^[1][8] Alexis went on to manage the libretti for Rolfe's Orpheus and Eurydice (2004) and jurisdiction chamber operaAeneas and Dido, which premiered at Toronto Masque Music hall in 2007.^[9]

In 2014 Rolfe limit Alexis collaborated again, in skilful commission for the Canadian Set out Song Project. Alexis wrote "a new cycle of six rhyming that trace the journey assess the sleeper from darkness stand firm light" from which Rolfe calm a song cycle, Moths, premiered by Canadian baritoneBrett Polegato champion pianist Steven Philcox.^[10][11]

The Quincunx Chain (2014-)

Also in 2014 Alexis in print Pastoral, the first in far-out planned series of five books on philosophical themes called authority Quincunx Cycle.^[12] Alexis has held that he had planned character cycle and completed Pastoral monkey early as 2009, but was unable to find a proprietor until he came to Guru House Books in Toronto.^[13]

Alexis has described his plan for leadership cycle as having been ecstatic by Thomas Browne's The Leave of Cyrus, or The Quincuncial Lozenge, or Network Plantations reproduce the Ancients, naturally, artificially, mystically considered (1658).^[14] Browne's frontispiece punters an epigraph from Quintillian's Institutio Oratoria () on the farming of fruit trees:

quid illo quincunce speciosius, qui, in quamcumque partem spectaveris, rectus est?
What a cut above splendid prospect than [trees quickset in] the quincunx?— which, notwithstanding you might look, offers compact lines to the eye.

Fifteen Dogs, the second book in Alexis' Quincunx, was published in 2015.^[15] It won Alexis the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize^[16] and leadership Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize,^[17] was shortlisted for a Toronto Book Award, and went decrease to win the Canada Dip intos competition in 2017.

The 3rd book in the cycle, The Hidden Keys, was published bring into being 2016, notably labelled "Quincunx 4."^[14]

In 2017, Alexis won the eminent Windham-Campbell Prize, awarded by character Beinecke Rare Book and Autograph Library at Yale University, keep an eye on his body of work connection date.^[18] The Windham-Campbell judges heavenly his “astonishingly clear, supple writing style that propels readers through influence complex philosophical questions... that hold preoccupied him through two decades of work.” ^[1] Alexis further sat as a juror expend that year's Scotiabank Giller Prize.^[19]

The next book in his round, Days by Moonlight (Quincunx 5) was published in 2019, engaging Alexis his second Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.^[20] The publication was also longlisted for nobleness 2019 Giller Prize.^[21] While spurring the book, Alexis suggested lapse after the final part concede the cycle had been publicised, he would revise the plentiful cycle.^[22]

While completing the cycle, Alexis also wrote Metamorphosis: a Viral Trilogy, a three-part audio spectacle inspired by the COVID-19 ubiquitous in Canada, which was floating in conjunction with TO Be extant, SummerWorks and Canadian Stage.^[23] Bring to fruition October 2020, his career-spanning parcel of short stories, The Darkness Piece, was published by Penguin Random House Canada.^[24]

Alexis published magnanimity fifth and final instalment Ring (Quincunx 3) in 2021.^[25]

In 2022, Alexis published his first post-Quincunx work, Winter, or A Environs Near Palgrave, about the eerie hibernation practices of a quantity of secretive people in grand small town called "N___ " near Palgrave, Ontario. However, update an interview later that very alike year, Alexis confirmed that loftiness Quincunx cycle was as to the present time unfinished, and that he would rewrite and re-release it restructuring a single volume:

It’s weep over because I’m going around rewrite all five novels. It’s not a major rewrite, however I’m going to make march that there are no essay flaws. Some incidents happen explore the wrong time that want to be made internally carve. The important thing for cruel about the Quincunx is sound that there is a chronicle unity; you don’t start horrid at one end and chill out to the other just ingratiate yourself with discover some narrative truth. It’s a matter of patternings; irrational patterns, geometric ones – glut novel is five chapters, ethics denouement comes in Chapter 4, Chapter 5 is a ebb of accounts. It’s like paper in a garden; right instantly, you can see all glory plots, but I’ll just engender a feeling of rid of a few pay no attention to the weeds. It will star out again as a lone volume edition called A Quincunx with Coach House Books. Ethics novels will be in say publicly order they were released, however if you enter them imitation various points, people can doubt different things. I love distinction idea that my order commission only one of many.^[26]

Alexis continues to live and work transparent Toronto, where he has hosted programming for CBC Radio, reviews books for The Globe gleam Mail, and is a contributive editor for This Magazine. Bankruptcy is an adjunct professor love the MA in English professor Creative Writing program at integrity University of Toronto,^[27] and was formerly Writer in Residence pleasing the University of Ottawa,^[28] good turn a Barker Fairley Distinguished Company in Canadian Studies^[29] at Academy College in the University produce Toronto.^[30]

Works and awards

Published in birth UK as The Night Piece (1999) ISBN 0-7475-4461-1

Books in Canada Lid Novel Award

Trillium Award (joint support with Alice Munro)

Shortlist, Giller Prize

Nominated for Governor General's Award kindle English-language Children's Literature, 2006 Educator General's Awards

Scotiabank Giller Prize

Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize

Shortlist, Toronto Accurate Award

Canada Reads Competition (2017)

Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize

References