Jane Urquhart to speak at UPEI as part of Confederation Lecture Series

Internationally acclaimed and award-winning author Jane Urquhart will speak on March 21, 2002, at 7:30 pm in the Duffy Amphitheatre, University of Prince Edward Island as part of the Confederation Lecture Series. Her talk entitled "The Characters I Have Been, or Why the Lost Boys are Annoying" will include reflections on L.M. Montgomery's influence on her writing. Urquhart will be reading from her latest novel, The Stone Carvers. The Confederation Lecture Series is sponsored by the Confederation Centre of the Arts, UPEI, and for this special talk, the L.M. Montgomery Institute at UPEI.

"Without question, Jane Urquhart has been one of the most popular fiction writers in Canada since the 1980s," says UPEI English professor Richard Lemm. "We are thrilled to have her speak. In the past decade, Urquhart has joined other celebrated Canadian authors in making Canadian fiction immensely successful internationally."

Her fiction has won such awards and honours as the Trillium Book Award, The Marian Engel Prize, and France's Le Prix de Meilleur Libre Etranger (Best Foreign Book Award). Her previous novel, The Underpainter, won the Governor-General's Award for Fiction and broke records by remaining on The Globe and Mail's national best-seller list for 132 weeks. Another novel, Away, was short-listed for the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and The Stone Carvers was a finalist for the Giller Prize.

One reviewer writes that "readers unfamiliar with Urquhart's work will discover novels that display her ability to weave rich narrative tapestries which shift between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, between real and imagined worlds, and between characters, their settings and their stories."

"Not only is she an inspiration to many other Canadian writers, but she is also a warm, witty, dynamic, and much-loved speaker and reader," says Lemm. "Also, I think Islanders will find her reflections on Montgomery's influence on her work to be very interesting."

Urquhart lives in southern Ontario, and spends part of each summer in Ireland. She was born in Little Long Lac, Ontario and educated in Toronto and Guelph. She has written three books of poetry and one collection of short fiction, and her novels have been published in the United States, the United Kingdom and France. She has been a writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa, Memorial University and the University of Toronto.

Urquhart's presentation is a prelude to the L.M. Montgomery Institute's International Conference, June 20-23, 2002, at UPEI on the theme of "L.M. Montgomery and Life Writing." Immediately following the conference, the L.M. Montgomery Institute will sponsor an intensive, one-week creative writing workshop with a subsequent two weeks of e-mail editorial consultations. For further information about the conference or the creative writing course, contact the L.M. Montgomery Institute at (902) 628-4346.

The Confederation Lecture Series features leading personalities and focuses on issues of national interest in Canada such as public policy, the arts and sciences, and humanities.

Immediately following Urquhart's presentation, there will be a book signing and reception. Admission is free.