Announcing the 2019/20 Writer in Residence
The Athabasca University writer-in-residence committee is very pleased to announce that award-winning author Steven Heighton will be the 2019-20 AU writer-in-residence.
Steven is the author of fourteen books, most recently The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep, a novel that has just appeared in French and Ukrainian translations and has been optioned for film, and The Waking Comes Late, which received the 2016 Governor General’s Award for Poetry.
His novel Afterlands has appeared in six countries, was cited on year-end lists in the USA, the UK, and Canada, and is in pre-production for film. His short fiction and poetry have received four gold National Magazine Awards and have appeared in London Review of Books, Best English Stories, Poetry, Best American Poetry, Tin House, TLR, Agni, Best American Mystery Stories, Zoetrope, London Magazine, New England Review, and five editions of Best Canadian Stories.
Heighton has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, the Moth prize in Ireland, and the W.H. Smith Award in Britain. He is an occasional fiction reviewer for the New York Times Book Review and has served as a writer in residence for several universities, including McGill, Massey College (U of T), Concordia, Queen’s, UPEI, and the University of Ottawa.
Interview with Dreamers Creative Writing
Kat McNichol, a Master of Arts-Integrated Studies alum, who has been previously featured in our Transforming Lives: Learners at AU series, recently sat down and chatted with Steven about his own writing, teaching others how to harness their own, and how he has found success writing in many different genres and styles. You can read that over here.
What is the Writer in Residence program?
The Writer in Residence is an invited artist who spends 60 per-cent of the one-year residency working on his or her own writing projects and 40 per-cent of the residency as a resource for students, faculty, the university community, and the writing community. The Writer in Residence advises these groups on all aspects of the writing process: from taking a manuscript from creation to publication. Stay tuned for future public readings and other literary events that Steven will be appearing in.
