Amanda Hale
I arrived on Hornby Island in 1989 and have lived here full-time until recent changes which now take me to Toronto each winter for teaching and to Cuba for annual visits. My Galleon Beach cabin, a five-minute bike ride from the Hornby Island Library, is my writing retreat from spring till fall, and I have a book table at the summer market on Wednesdays.
My most recent book is a collection of stories set in Baracoa, Cuba — In the Embrace of the Alligator, published by Thistledown Press, as were two previous novels — My Sweet Curiosity, and The Reddening Path. I am currently working on a screenplay of my first novel, Sounding the Blood, which was published by Raincoast Books in 2001. I've been fortunate to receive a number of awards for my writing, including the 2008 Prism International literary non-fiction award, and have twice been a finalist for the BC Relit Awards. Two of my novels have been translated, one into Spanish and another into Czech.
Travel and research are my inspirations. In 1996 I traveled to Haida Gwaii and spent two weeks at the ruins of the Rose Harbour whaling station, which experience led to Sounding the Blood, a historical novel set in the heyday of BC coastal whaling. The Reddening Path takes my readers to Guatemala with Paméla, a Mayan girl returning in search of her birth mother after growing up as an adoptee in Canada. My Sweet Curiosity vaults between present day Toronto, Renaissance Europe, and pre-Tiananmen crisis Beijing. With my latest book I invite my readers on a virtual trip to Cuba where I have become so much at home, thanks to the hospitality and inclusivity of the Cuban people.
As a child, with my nose always in a book, I dreamed of one day living close to a library with an unlimited abundance of reading material. That dream has come true, and in this technological age I can order books on line. But I never imagined that my own books would be in that library.
Amanda Hale is available for readings and to speak to book clubs and readers' groups
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