Nationality Canadian Role Novelist Alma mater University of Toronto Education University of Toronto | Genre fiction Awards Scotiabank Giller Prize Name Elizabeth Hay | |
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Occupation novelist and short story writer Notable works Late Nights on Air; A Student of Weather, Small Change, Garbo Laughs Nominations Governor General's Award for English-language fiction Books Late Nights on Air, His Whole Life, Alone in the Classroom, A student of weather, Garbo laughs | ||
Elizabeth Grace Hay (born October 22, 1951) is a Canadian novelist and short story writer.
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Her novel A Student of Weather (2000) was a finalist for the Giller Prize and won the CAA MOSAID Technologies Award for Fiction and the TORGI Award. She has been a nominee for the Governor General's Award twice, for Small Change in 1997 and for Garbo Laughs in 2003, and won the Giller Prize for her 2007 novel Late Nights on Air.
In 2002, she received the Marian Engel Award, presented by the Writers' Trust of Canada to an established female writer for her body of work — including novels, short fiction, and creative non-fiction.
Life
Hay was born on October 22, 1951 in Owen Sound, Ontario. She is the daughter of a high school principal and a painter. She spent a year in England when she was fourteen, then returned to Canada to attend the University of Toronto.
In January, 1972, she quit university before finishing and travelled out west by train. In 1974 she moved to Yellowknife, NWT. She worked for ten years as a CBC radio broadcaster in Yellowknife, Winnipeg and Toronto and then moved to Mexico, where she freelanced. In 1986 she moved to New York City, and then returned to Canada in 1992 with her family. She lives in Ottawa with her husband Mark. She has two children: a son, Ben, and a daughter, Sochi.
Critical reputation and style
In an interview with the CBC in 2007, Hay commented on the relationship between her writing and her career in radio. "When I worked in Yellowknife," she said, "I was writing poetry and stories on the side and not getting very far. I felt kind of schizophrenic, like my radio work was one type of thing and my writing was another and there was a gap between. That became even more pronounced when I started working for CBC’s Sunday Morning, doing radio documentaries. I took me a while to realize that there didn’t need to be such a wide gap between those two forms of writing, and that they could cross-fertilize. Good radio writing is similar to any good writing. It’s direct and economical and intimate and full of detail. Also, it sets your visual imagination working."