Barbara Gowdy

“When I see elephants, I get the feeling other people get when they enter a cathedral,” novelist Barbara Gowdy told Saturday Night. “I’m in awe.”

In 1996, Ms. Gowdy travelled to Kenya to study elephant behaviour, and the end result was the imaginative 1998 novel The White Bone, a story about an elephant told from the point of view of the elephants themselves. The White Bone received international attention and was nominated for the Giller Prize in 1998 – Ms. Gowdy’s second Giller nomination.

Ms. Gowdy is an internationally know author whose books include Falling Angels, Mister Sandman and the short story collection We So Seldom Look on Love, which Vancouver filmmaker Lynne Stopkewich turned into the film Kissed in 1996.

Other accolades received by Ms. Gowdy includes having Mister Sandman selected as Margaret Atwood’s Book of the Year choice for the Times Literary Supplement and named a Village Voice choice for Favourite Book of the Year in 1995. In 1996, she received the prestigious Marian Engel Prize for women writers.