Vassanji, Foran to write on Richler
JAMES ADAMS
From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail
Governor-General’s Literary Award nominee Charles Foran and two-time Giller Prize winner M. G. Vassanji have each been signed to write biographies of novelist-essayist Mordecai Richler, author of such Canadian classics as Barney’s Version, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and St. Urbain’s Horseman.
Both writers will enjoy the co-operation of Richler’s family in their respective research, but the agent for the family, Toronto lawyer Michael Levine, says neither book will be an authorized or official biography. Richler died in Montreal at the age of 70 in 2001.
Foran’s biography will be a full-fledged work, tentatively scheduled for publication by Knopf Canada in 2009. Vassanji’s will be of more modest extent and included as part of the Penguin Lives Canada series being assembled under the general editorship of John Ralston Saul, husband of former governor-general Adrienne Clarkson. No release date for the Vassanji work has been announced.
Foran, 46, a novelist himself as well as an essayist and memoirist, was short-listed for the Governor-General’s Literary Award for non-fiction in 1995 for The Last House of Ulster. In a statement released yesterday, Louise Dennys, executive publisher of Knopf Canada, said she felt “Mordecai would have been well pleased with Charles Foran as his biographer: Like Mordecai, he is both a book writer and a journalist, and he too understands the exigencies of the ’scribblers’ craft.”
For his part, Foran, born and raised in Toronto, with a degree from University College, Dublin, said “no other Canadian writer has meant as much to me as Mordecai Richler. . . . I admire his craft and appreciate the moral seriousness of his work. I also enjoyed the public persona, a bracing mix of reserve, irascibility and candour.”
Vassanji, 56, won the inaugural Giller Prize for excellence in Canadian English-language literature in 1994 for his novel The Book of Secrets, and repeated the feat in 2003 with The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. The Penguin Lives Canada series promises to offer a decidedly eclectic mix-and-match of subject and biographer, with the first three biographies scheduled to appear in early 2008. Among the writers signed to the series are David Adams Richards (for a biography of Lord Beaverbrook), Nino Ricci (on Pierre Trudeau), Joseph Boyden (Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont) and Margaret MacMillan (Stephen Leacock).
It’s known that at least two other Richler biographies are in the works by Reinhold Kramer and John Ayre, but these are being prepared without the active co-operation of Richler’s widow, Florence, 76, and her five children.
Ismailimail 