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Barbara Gowdy was born in Windsor in 1950 but grew up in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills, having moved there with her family in 1954. After graduating from high school in the late 1960s, she studied at York University and the Royal Conservatory of Music. Before deciding to become a full-time writer in the early 1980s, Gowdy pursued several other career paths including musical theatre, the securities industry, and being an editor for the publisher Lester and Orpen Dennys. Since devoting herself to her writing, she has, from time to time, taught creative writing at Ryerson and the University of Toronto and has worked as an interviewer for the TVOntario program, Imprint.
Though she has earned an international reputation for her uncanny ability to characters who are abnormal to the extreme while at the same time presenting them in a sympathetic and moving manner, her first novel was actually quite conventional. Published in 1988, Through the Green Valley is a historical novel that follows the struggle of an Irish peasant family who eventually move to America to escape the war and famine in their own country. It was not until the publication of Falling Angels in 1989, however, that Gowdy received any critical attention. A darkly comic novel set in the 1950s, Falling Angels tells the story of three sisters growing up in a highly eccentric and dysfunctional suburban family. This book met with critical and popular success and was followed three years later by the short story collection We So Seldom Look On Love, the title of which is taken from Frank O'Hara's poem "Ode On Necrophilia." The eight stories which make up this volume take on many aspects of sexuality which the average person would consider bizarre, abnormal, and even disturbing. Amazingly, though, Gowdy skillfully manages to divert these tales away from the shocking and sensational, foregrounding the sympathetic and moving qualities of these characters Ð who include a necrophiliac, an exhibitionist, and a woman with four legs Ð so that by the end of the stories their situations seem somehow to be comprehensible, even normal. Similarly, her next novel, Mister Sandman (1995), is able to explore these questions of what is "normal" through another series of bizarre and marginalized characters who somehow manage to constitute a "happy family," but in ways which exist outside society's usual expectations of what that means.
Gowdy's most recent novel, The White Bone, is again a daring work of fiction, but one which takes her off in an altogether different direction. The White Bone is not simply a story about elephants, it is a tale told by the elephants themselves. To write from such a perspective, Gowdy has imagined everything about an elephant culture and society, from language to spiritual beliefs, memory to song. It is also, at its core, a classic quest story which follows the life of one elephant, Mud, as she searches for A Safe Place which will bring the elephants safety from the drought and hunters which, in different but equally deadly ways, threaten their existence. Published in September of this year, The White Bone is already climbing the Canadian bestseller list and has been nominated for the Giller Prize.
Barbara Gowdy's books have been translated into a number of languages including French, German, Dutch, and Norwegian. In 1996, a successful film, "Kissed," was made from the title story of We So Seldom Look on Love which tells the story of a woman who works in a funeral home and makes love to the corpses. Stories by Barbara Gowdy have also been included in a number of anthologies including Best American Short Stories (1989), The Girl Wants To (1993), The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (1995), and the Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women (1998). Gowdy has been a finalist for several prominent literary awards, including the Trillium Award for We So Seldom Look on Love and the Trillium Award, the Giller Prize, and the Governor General's Award for Mr. Sandman. Recently, The White Bone earned Gowdy her second Giller nomination and many readers and critics are also expecting her to be nominated for the Governor General's Award again this year. While Gowdy has yet to actually win any of these major prizes for one of her books, in 1996 she was awarded the Marian Engel Award which recognizes the complete body of work by a Canadian woman writer. A great and unusual honour for a writer so early into her career, the Marian Engel Award was prominent endorsement of Gowdy's talent and status as one of Canada's best living writers.
| Mister Sandman |
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| We So Seldom Look on Love |
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