Occupation Writer Role Author Name Madeline Sonik | Period 1990s-present Nationality Canadian | |
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Notable works Arms, Afflictions & Departures Education University of Western Ontario, University of British Columbia Books Afflictions & Departures: Essays, Stone Sightings: Poems, The Book of Changes, Drying the bones, Belinda and the Dustbunnys | ||
Madeline Sonik discusses her book Afflictions and Departures
Madeline Sonik (born May 12, 1960) is a Canadian author.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, of mixed English-Russian parentage, she was educated at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and at the University of British Columbia, where she earned a doctorate for a thesis that explored the application of Jungian principles to the creative writing process. She has taught creative writing courses in Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia, and from 2008-2010 was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria. In spring 2015, she served as writer-in-residence at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario.
Her publications include a novel, a short story collection, a children's book, a poetry collection, and a volume of personal essays. In addition, she has coedited three Canadian anthologies and has won many awards for her nonfiction, including the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction (2006). Her novel Arms was described by The Globe and Mail as a "verbal heartache, a bravura performance of language and perverse imagination".
Sonik was among 10 authors longlisted for the 2012 BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. The nomination was for Afflictions & Departures, which illustrates an experimental nonfiction genre Sonik has termed a "fracture." "A fracture is a series of short, linked memoir pieces that uses techniques of hard-boiled journalism and literary fiction, and self-consciously disrupts or fractures conceptions of linear time." The book was also a shortlisted nominee for the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize. It won the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize 2012.
Sonik currently resides in Victoria, British Columbia, where she teaches in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria.