Annabel Lyon, author of the much-acclaimed The Golden Mean, will read at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt on Saturday, April 10 at 8 p.m. This is the third in the Sunshine Coast Arts Council's spring series of readings. Admission is free thanks to the generosity of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Winner of the 2009 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, Lyon was also a finalist for the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award. The Golden Mean is a novel told from the point of view of the almost legendary philosopher, Aristotle, himself a student in Plato's Academy, and later the tutor of Alexander the Great, another semi-legend.
The Rogers Writers' Trust jury commented, "In this alarmingly confident and transporting debut novel, Lyon offers us that rarest of treats: a book about philosophy, about the power of ideas, that chortles and sings like an earthy romance."
A philosophy student at Simon Fraser University, before earning a Masters degree in creative writing at the University of British Columbia, Lyon developed an early appreciation of Aristotle and his times. In an interview on CTV, Lyon explained that she wanted to make those times "resonate with our culture now."
She wanted her characters to be "engaged with our time." Indeed, her Alexander, while certainly great, like today's soldiers in Iraq, suffers from "soldier's heart," aka P.T.S.D.
This reading marks the second time the Arts Council series has been graced by Lyon. She read here shortly after the publication of her first book, Oxygen, a collection of short stories published in 2000.
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