Writer in Residence

Canadians in the New Yorker

By Irina Kovalyova

If you missed the piece in the National Post last Saturday by Nadine Fladd on how Canadians changed The New Yorker, you should check it out.

Coinciding with release of The New Yorker’s celebrated summer fiction issue, the article chronicles how Morley Callaghan, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Rivka Galchen (who won the 2014 Danuta Gleed Literary Award announced last week), David Bezmosgis, and Sheila Heti have expanded the magazine’s boundaries over the past 90 years.

I began to read The New Yorker when I lived in Manhattan in 1996, and since then became a devotee. The magazine, as Fladd reminds us, publishes the world’s best authors. Indeed, most of what I know of contemporary American and world literature I’ve learned through its fiction pages.

Even when I’m not reading the magazine on paper, I listen to its Fiction podcast or browse its Fiction and Books blog.

The views expressed in the Writer-in-Residence blogs are those held by the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Open Book: Toronto.

The views expressed in the Writer-in-Residence blogs are those held by the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Open Book.


Irina Kovalyova has a Master’s degree in Chemistry from Brown University, a doctoral degree in Microbiology from Queen’s University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Simon Fraser University. She has previously interned for NASA and worked for two years as a forensic analyst in New York City. She was born in Russia and currently lives in Vancouver.