Cary Fagan Writers in Residence Archives
Cary Fagan was born in 1957 and grew up in the Toronto suburbs. His books include the The Student (finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Toronto Book Award), A Bird’s Eye (finalist for the Rogers Trust Fiction Prize, an Amazon.ca Best Book of the Year), the story collection My Life Among the Apes (longlisted for the Giller Prize), and the novel The Animals’ Waltz (winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award). His short stories have been published in Geist, CNQ, The New Quarterly, and Best Canadian Stories.
As a writer for children, Cary has published both picture books and novels. He is the recipient of the Vicky Metcalf Award for Young People for his body of work. He has also won the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award, the IODE Jean Throop Award, a Mr. Christie Silver Medal, and the Joan Betty Stuchner—Oy Vey!—Funniest Children’s Book Award. He has visited schools and libraries across the country.
Cary’s work has been translated into French, Italian, German, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Turkish, Russian, Polish, Chinese, Korean and Persian.
Cary lives in the west end of Toronto. He teaches courses in writing for children at the University of Toronto Continuing Studies.
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September 28, 2020
Read Any New Middle Grade Books Lately?
As a certain book tells us, when we become adults we are supposed to put away childish things. And as readers, we move from listening to stories, to struggling through early readers by ourselves, to ...
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September 24, 2020Literary Ancestors
It’s said that every person has two families. There’s the one that you are born into and the one that you choose for yourself—your friends. But writers have a third family, the literary ancestors ...
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September 21, 2020What Timothy Findley Taught Me
Unfortunately, it isn’t often that a major biography of a Canadian writer is published. Such a book takes years to write and costs the author a great deal, not only in work time but also in research ...
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September 17, 2020To Pandemic or not to Pandemic
Surely any period of upheaval and uncertainty is a difficult one to start a novel. And here we are, seven months into the pandemic and with no end in sight. Let’s say that you’re a novelist ...
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September 14, 2020Short is Beautiful
Don’t get me wrong, I like to lose myself in a big, fat novel. My first and still-favourite author is Charles Dickens. Not long ago I managed to get through Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and a couple ...
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September 10, 2020A Wolf at the Dog Show
If you’re reading this article you are no doubt familiar with the names of major publishers and their imprints—Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Knopf, Mcclelland and Stewart, etc. You might ...
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September 08, 2020Picture Book Magic
People are often surprised to learn that a picture book begins with the words. But every children’s book editor I’ve met has preferred to read a picture-book manuscript without any images. A good ...
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September 03, 2020
My One Week on the Bestseller List
On Saturday, June 21, 2014 I opened the Globe and Mail to the books section (back in the time when newspapers had book sections) and after reading the reviews I began to idly scan the bestseller list. ...
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September 01, 2020When Your Father is Your Biggest Fan
I don’t believe that any father was more proud of having a son for a writer than my own dad. Whenever I met somebody who knew him—it might be a waiter in a restaurant—the person would say, “Oh, ...