Writing: 'A Fantastic Privilege'

“It's a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader. You have time to go into certain questions that are painful or difficult or complicated. That's one thing that appeals to me very much about the novel form” – Anne Michaels
 

Born in Toronto, Canada on this date in 1958, Michaels is an award-winning poet and novelist whose work has been translated and published in over 45 countries. Her books have won myriad international awards including the Orange Prize the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas.

Both a graduate of and writing teacher at Toronto University, Michaels said she knew she wanted to be a writer from a very young age.  “I started to write things down as a very young child,” she said,  “wanting to find a way to remember - to keep close, somehow - moments that made an impression on me.” 

                                     After starting her career in poetry, she turned her creative juices toward novels starting with Fugitive Pieces.   The book established Michaels’ long-running style of exploring the relationship between history and memory, and how people remember.  This remarkable work on The Holocaust won an equally remarkable basketful of awards – a dozen international prizes in all and was adapted into a feature film.

“Hold a book in your hand,” Michaels said, “and you’re a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.”

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