Name Helen Humphreys | Role Poet | |
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Nominations Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction People also search for Kevin J. Anderson, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Kaye Anderson Books The lost garden, The Evening Chorus, The frozen Thames, The Reinvention of Love, Afterimage | ||
2014 Trillium Book Award: Helen Humphreys
Helen Humphreys (born 13 June 1961) is a Canadian poet and novelist.
Contents
- 2014 Trillium Book Award Helen Humphreys
- Personal life
- Writing career
- Poetry
- Novels
- Nonfiction
- Awards
- References
Personal life
Humphreys was born in Kingston-on-Thames, England, along with her brother Martin and sister Cathy. She now lives in Kingston, Ontario with her dog Charlotte. When she was younger she was expelled from high school and had to attend an alternative school to finish her education.
Writing career
Humphreys's first novel, Leaving Earth, was a New York Times Notable Book in 1998, and a winner of the City of Toronto Book Award.
In describing how she became a writer, Humphreys said, "I started writing when I was young and I just kept going. I read voraciously. I sent my poems (for I was writing exclusively poems then) out to magazines, and eventually I began to get them published. My first book of poetry came out when I was 25."
In a very favourable review of The Reinvention of Love in The Globe and Mail, Donna Bailey Nurse wrote: "The story is set amid the political turbulence and artistic fervour of 19th-century Paris. Charles Sainte-Beuve, an influential critic, earns the friendship of Victor Hugo after writing a review celebrating the writer’s poems. He joins Hugo’s literary circle, the Cenacle, which includes painter Delacroix, poet Lamartine and the boastful, profligate Alexandre Dumas. Charles becomes a fixture in the bustling Hugo household on Notre-Dame-des-Champs."
The Globe and Mail had this to say about Ms. Humphreys's most recent novel: "The Evening Chorus, when all is said and done, is a formally conventional but for the most part satisfying yarn; a quiet novel about a calamitous event whose most trenchant passages show the cast of Humphreys’s poet’s eye."