Stephen Henighan

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Stephen Henighan (born 1960 in Hamburg, Germany) is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, journalist and academic.

Arriving in Canada at the age of five, Henighan grew up in rural eastern Ontario. He studied political science at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he won two short story prizes. From 1984 to 1992 he lived in Montreal as a freelance writer and completed an M.A. at Concordia University. He later earned a doctorate in Spanish American literature at Wadham College, Oxford. He also studied in Colombia, Romania and Germany. From 1996 to 1998 Henighan taught Latin American literature at Queen Mary & Westfield College, University of London. Since 1999 he has taught at the University of Guelph, Ontario.[1]

Henighan has published three novels. His short stories have been published in Canada, the U.S., Great Britain and, in translation, in Europe. Henighan’s novels and stories feature immigrants, travellers and other displaced people caught between cultures; his fiction has been praised for its precise descriptions of cross-cultural tensions and both praised and criticized for paying extensive attention to politics.[2]

Henighan’s journalism has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Walrus, Geist, The Globe and Mail and the Montreal Gazette. He has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award[1], among other prizes.

In 2006 Henighan set off a controversy when he attacked the Giller Prize. As an academic, he has published articles on Latin American literature and Lusophone African fiction and a book on the Nobel Prize- winning Guatemalan novelist Miguel Angel Asturias. Henighan has published translations from Spanish and Portuguese, notably of the Angolan writer Ondjaki[2], and is general editor of a translation series run by Biblioasis[3], a literary publisher based near Windsor, Ontario.

Contents

[edit] Books by Stephen Henighan

  • Other Americas (1990, novel)
  • Nights in the Yungas (1992, short fiction)
  • The Places Where Names Vanish (1998, novel)
  • North of Tourism (1999, short fiction)
  • The Streets of Winter (2004, novel)
  • A Grave in the Air (2007, short fiction)

[edit] Non-fiction

  • Assuming the Light: The Parisian Literary Apprenticeship of Miguel Angel Asturias (1999)
  • When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing (2002)
  • Lost Province: Adventures in a Moldovan Family (2002)
  • A Report on the Afterlife of Culture (2008)

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ Canadian Who's Who Vol. XLII (University of Toronto Press, 2007)
  2. ^ The Globe and Mail, 5 June 1999, The Times Literary Supplement, 7 December 2007<ref> The Globe and Mail 19 Jan 2008, The literary Review of Canada, april 2002</li></ol></ref>