Elizabeth Grace Hay (born October 22, 1951) is a Canadian novelist and short story writer.[1]
Her 2007 novel Late Nights on Air won the Giller Prize. Her first novel A Student of Weather (2000) was a finalist for the Giller Prize and won the CAA MOSAID Technologies Award for Fiction and the TORGI Award.[2] She has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award twice, for her short-story collection Small Changein1997 and her novel Garbo Laughsin2003. His Whole Life (2015) was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Hay's memoir about the last years of her parents' lives, All Things Consoled, won the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Her most recent novel, Snow Road Station, was named one of the best books of 2023 by The New Yorker.[3]
In 2002, she received the Marian Engel Award, presented by the Writers' Trust of Canada to an established female writer for her body of work — including novels, short fiction, and creative non-fiction.
Hay was born on October 22, 1951, in Owen Sound, Ontario.[4] She is the daughter of a high school principal and a painter. She spent a year in England when she was fifteen and later attended the University of Toronto.
In September, 1972, she quit university and a few months later travelled out west by train.[5] The following year she returned to Toronto and finished her degree in English and Philosophy. In 1974 she moved to Yellowknife, NWT. She worked for ten years as a CBC radio broadcaster in Yellowknife, Winnipeg and Toronto and then moved to Mexico, where she freelanced for the CBC. In 1986 she settled in New York City, and then returned to Canada in 1992 with her family. She lives in Ottawa with her husband Mark Fried, a literary translator. She has two children: a son, Ben, and a daughter, Sochi.[6]
In an interview with the CBC in 2007, Hay commented on the relationship between her writing and her career in radio. "When I worked in Yellowknife," she said, "I was writing poetry and stories on the side and not getting very far. I felt kind of schizophrenic, like my radio work was one type of thing and my writing was another and there was a gap between. That became even more pronounced when I started working for CBC's Sunday Morning, doing radio documentaries. I took me a while to realize that there didn't need to be such a wide gap between those two forms of writing, and that they could cross-fertilize. Good radio writing is similar to any good writing. It's direct and economical and intimate and full of detail. Also, it sets your visual imagination working."[7]
"Ten Beauty Tips You Never Asked For" (inDropped Threads 2, edited by Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson, 2003, Vintage Canada)
"The Most Fearless Book I Read" (inThe Book I Read, edited by Peder Zane, 2004, Norton)
"My Debt to D.H. Lawrence" (inWriting Life: Celebrated Canadian and International Authors on Writing and Life, edited by Constance Rooke, 2006, McClelland & Stewart)
"Between Books" (inFinding the Words: Writers on Inspiration, Desire, War, Celebrity, Exile, and Breaking the Rules, edited by Jared Bland, 2011, McClelland & Stewart)
"The Mother as Material" (inThe Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro, edited by David Staines, 2016, Cambridge UP)
