Today Open Book speaks with Governor General's Literary Award-winning author Jane Urquhart. Her most recent book, Sanctuary Line (McClelland & Stewart), was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and praised by Alice Munro as evoking "the most compelling depiction of the sense of place in human lives."
We are pleased to feature Jane Urquhart as part of our IFOA Interview series.
IFOA: Ontario is the International Festival of Authors' touring component, bringing authors from IFOA’s roster of the best contemporary writers from around the globe to a number of Ontario locations.
Open Book:
Tell us about the book from which you will be reading at IFOA: Ontario.
Jane Urquhart:
I will actually be reading from two books; my most recent, Sanctuary Line, and an earlier novel, The Underpainter.
Sanctuary Line is set in Southwestern Ontario, Essex County to be precise, and concerns Migrant labour, monarch butterflies and Irish ancestry, not necessarily in that order.
The Underpainter is partly set in the Thunder Bay area during the post World War One era, and since I will be visiting Thunder Bay with the festival, it seemed appropriate that I read passages from those sections dealing with Lake Superior, Sibley Peninsula, and Port Arthur (as one half of Thunder Bay was then called.)
OB:
To what aspect of the IFOA: Ontario are you most looking forward?
JU:
As a writer who lives and works in the country I look forward to being in urban environments and meeting and talking with readers and other authors.
OB:
Tell us about a favourite spot or area in Ontario.
JU:
I was born a few hundred kilometers north-west of Lake Superior and have a romantic soft spot for that part of the world and all the characters who lived in the little mining settlements, many of which have disappeared or turned into ghost towns.
OB:
What is your favourite part of touring?
JU:
Meeting my readers.
OB:
What were some of your early experiences with public readings? Is there a learning curve to reading in public?
JU:
I used to be terrified, early days, of presenting myself and reading in public. I quickly learned however that audiences of book lovers are very kind.
OB:
Tell us about a favourite book set in Ontario.
JU:
The Love of a Good Woman or anything at all by Alice Munro. Many of Munro’s stories are set in the small towns and villages and the rural countryside of southern Ontario.
OB:
What is your writing environment like?
JU:
I am lucky enough to be able to work year round, now, in a little cabin on the edge of Lake Ontario (in Eastern Ontario) and in a spot where I and my extended family have spent some time each year since my birth.
OB:
What are you reading right now?
JU:
Light Years, a wonderful novel written in 1975 by American author James Salter.
OB:
What can you tell us about your next project?
JU:
My next project is at the exciting stage where it is slowly revealing itself. As is often the case, it is set in Ontario and Ireland, and so far it seems to involve airplanes, painters, the rising damp and bicycles. But what kind of pattern these things make, and how they relate to one another, remains to be seen. Part of the joy of writing is finding out.
Jane Urquhart was born in Little Long Lac, Ontario, and grew up in Toronto. She is the author of five internationally acclaimed novels: The Whirlpool, which received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France; Changing Heaven; Away, winner of the Trillium Award and a finalist for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Underpainter, winner of the Governor General’s Award and a finalist for the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; The Stone Carvers, which was a finalist for The Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and longlisted for the Booker Prize; and A Map of Glass, a finalist for a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. Urquhart has received the Marian Engel Award, and is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and an Officer of the Order of Canada.
For more information about Sanctuary Line please visit the McClelland & Stewart website.
Buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.
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