Celebrated First Nations novelist Eden Robinson will be in Sechelt for a reading next Saturday, April 25.
When her first novel, Monkey Beach, was short-listed for both the Governor General’s and the Giller awards and won the Ethel Wilson award in 2001, Robinson became one of Canada’s first female Native writers to gain international acclaim. The novel combines contemporary realism with Native mysticism as its protagonist, raised in a coastal village attuned to White society, is disturbed by a growing awareness that she is heir to an ancient Heisla tradition of shamanism.
By contrast, Robinson’s earlier short stories in her award winning collection Traplines (1996) explored the dark and deviant element of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side.
Her latest novel, Blood Sports (2006) returns to that setting and some of her earlier non-native characters to trace the miraculous survival of love in the midst of violence, cruelty, and degradation.
While Robinson is known as a First Nations author, in a larger sense she is a West Coast author who writes with equal insight into the dominant society and her own Heisla culture.
Robinson lives where she grew up, in the village of Kitamaat. She is a lively and engaging speaker, and has promised to read from both of her novels.
Her reading is at 8 p.m. on April 25 at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt. Admission is by donation, courtesy the Canada Council.
