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Writer in Residence

The Department of English annually sponsors a writer-in-residence, both to offer support to Canadian writers and to give students direct access to the writer's advice and experience. The writer-in-residence holds regular office hours for students who wish to discuss their own work, visits classes upon invitation, gives public readings, and on occasion teaches a course.

The program is funded jointly by the Faculty of Arts and the Canada Council. For further information about the writer-in-residence program, please contact the Department Chair.

Rawi Hage 2019 - 2020

Award-winning author and poet Rawi Hage grew up in Beirut before moving to Canada in 1992. Along with his 4 award-winning novels, he has published journalism and short fiction in magazines such as the PEN America Journal. In August 2013, he was named Vancouver Public Library's Ninth Writer in Residence.

Rawi’s first in a series of awards was the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2008 for his internationally acclaimed debut novel 'De Niro's Game'. He then went on to win the Paragraph Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction in 2008 for his novel Cockroach and again in 2018 for Carnival. Rawi has also been a short-listed finalist for major awards such as the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction for his renowned 2018 book 'Beirut Hellfire Society'. More recently, in November 2019, Rawi received the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award from the Writers' Trust of Canada, awarded annually to a mid-career fiction writer with a remarkable body of work.

His books have been translated into 30 languages and are read around the world. For his next project, Rawi intends to return to the genre in which he first made his name, the short story.