The first reading of the Suns-hine Coast Arts Council's spring series will be held at the Arts Centre in Sechelt on Friday, Feb. 9, at 8 p.m. Admission is free, courtesy of Canada Council.
Keith Maillard will read from his four-volume work, Difficulty at the Beginning, comprising four separate but linked novels, which he released between September 2005 and September 2006.
Set for the most part in Maillard's native West Virginia, the work spans the period, roughly from 1958 to 1970, from Eisenhower through Johnston to Nixon, from the Cuban missile crisis to Vietnam. Hailed by The Globe & Mail in The Globe 100 as "a work of terrible beauty and grace, a masterpiece fit to contend with the best novels of the last century," it is the story of a young man coming to maturity during a period of cataclysmic change.
Maillard was born in Wheeling, WV, in 1942. Relocating to Canada in 1970, he became a citizen in 1976. He has published numerous novels to considerable acclaim. Motet won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize in 1990, and Light in the Company of Women was a runner-up for the same prize in 1994. Hazard Zones was short listed for the Commonwealth Literary Prize, 1996; Gloria for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, 1999.
In 2004, Maillard was awarded the Polish Amer-ican Historical Association's Creative Arts Prize for The Clarinet Polka and the West Virginia Library Association Literary Merit Award. His one volume of poetry, Dementia Americana, won the Gerald Lampert Award for poetry in 1995. Maillard lives in West Vancouver. He serves as professor and co-chair of creative writing in the department of theatre, film and creative writing at UBC.
