Katherine Govier
Katherine Govier is the author of eleven novels, three short story collections, and a collection of nursery rhymes. Her most recent novel is The Three Sisters Bar and Hotel (HarperAvenue). Here previous novel, The Ghost Brush (published in the US as The Printmaker's Daughter), is about the daughter of the famous Japanese printmaker, Hokusai, creator of The Great Wave. Her novel Creation, about John James Audubon in Labrador, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2003.
Katherine's fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the United Kingdom, the United States, and throughout the Commonwealth, and in translation in Holland, Italy, Turkey, Spain, Japan, Romania, Latvia and Slovenia. She is the winner of Canada's Marian Engel Award for a woman writer (1997) and the Toronto Book Award (1992). Creation was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2003.
Katherine has been instrumental in establishing three innovative writing programs. In 1989, with teacher Trevor Owen, she helped found Writers in Electronic Residence. In 2011 she founded The Shoe Project, a writing workshop for immigrant and refugee women. She continues as the Chair of its Board of Directors. In 2019 Katherine was made a member of the Order of Canada.
She has edited two collections of travel essays, Solo: Writers on Pilgrimage and WIthout a Guide.
“To learn from him, I did not have to believe he was a good man or a fair man.”
“Pictures and words don't hurt anyone, except for those who are afraid of history.”
“It is a simple thing, a name. We are given one, we grow in to it, we bear it. Simple for the rest of creation.”
“What if . . . you come to the wild and discover that it is not wild at all? What if half the world is here before you?”