Snow Road Station

The main characters and the locale of Snow Road Station (available in April, 2023) will be familiar to readers of my previous novel His Whole Life. Lulu Blake, in her sixties now, has the starring role in Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days.” An ambition come true, until she...

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RBC Taylor Prize

All Things Consoled: a daughter's memoir was a finalist for the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize for Nonfiction. Here's the jury citation by the three jurors, Camilla Gibb, Roy MacGregor, and Beverley McLachlin: IN THIS BRILLIANT AND HONEST MEMOIR, Elizabeth Hay traces the final...

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Maclean’s Interview

I very much enjoyed talking to Brian Bethune of Maclean's magazine about my memoir All Things Consoled. This link will take you there. I should probably correct two small details. My parents were 89, not 88, when my mother's health fell apart. And she had been trapped...

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Narrating My Own Books

For a long time I wanted to narrate at least one of my own audio books and now I've narrated three. In the fall of 2017, in a studio across the Ottawa River in Aylmer, I spent eight sessions or so in front of a microphone reading my second novel Garbo Laughs. We had...

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Literary Sofa

Isabel Costello from the Literary Sofa, one of the best fiction blogs in the UK, included His Whole Life in her roundup of the best Spring 2017 titles. Now she has gilded the lily by featuring the novel with a review, several photos, and a posting by me. For the full...

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Chapbook: The Original Title

Available now as a beautiful chapbook published by Maureen Scott Harris is the Page Lecture I gave at Queen's University in 2015. "The Original Title" is a talk about editing and being edited and bears directly on my novel Late Nights on Air. Here is the first...

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Globe & Mail Lauds New Zealand Trip

Marsha Lederman in the Globe & Mail gives an exciting account of the recent trip to New Zealand by Canadian writers. I was lucky enough to be one of them. Thinking back on it, it seems to me that I went very far away and then I came home again, not necessarily...

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Radio New Zealand Interview

In August and early September a little band of Canadians travelled to writers’ festivals in New Zealand and Australia, so now I am a connoisseur of the flat white, a more potent latte than you’ll find in Canada and a source of rivalry between the two countries down...

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NOW’s Top 10 Best Books

His Whole Life made the Top 10 Books of 2015 in NOW Toronto Magazine, with this citation: "Hay's expertly realized novel, set during the 1955 Quebec referendum, is a poignant portrait of a complex family dealing with loss and regret, riffing on a 10 year-old boy's...

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