5 Bonnie Burnard
Prolific is not an adjective associated with the name Bonnie Burnard.
She has eschewed quantity in favour of quality throughout her writing
career. It has been a decade since her novel, A Good House, took
home the Giller Prize. Her long-awaited second novel, Suddenly
(HarperCollins), is ostensibly about death. The plot concerns the final
stages of life for a middle-aged woman suffering from breast cancer. The
underlying premise, though, is one of life, and the unique nature of
lifelong friendship among women. As the Globe & Mail succinctly
put it: “Burnard shoos away the notion that good people make dull
fiction.” She has consciously avoided elements of greed, perversion and
war in her work, and sees herself as a kind of literary guardian of the
things—family, friendship, happiness—that greed, perversion and war
destroy.
Bonnie Burnard is also the author of two acclaimed collections of short
fiction, Casino and Other Stories (Finalist, Giller Prize) and Women
of Influence (Winner, Commonwealth Prize).
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