Background
Louise Penny was born on July 1, 1958, in Toronto, Ontario.
broadcaster journalist novelist writer
Louise Penny was born on July 1, 1958, in Toronto, Ontario.
Penny earned a Bachelor of Applied Arts (Radio and Television) from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University) in 1979.
Upon receiving her Bachelor of Applied Arts in Radio and Television Arts from Ryerson Polytechnic in 1979, Louise Penny began a lengthy career as a radio host and journalist (see Journalism) with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Through her work, she honed her public speaking skills and the ability to relate to others, skills that would later serve her well as an author.
In 2004 Penny met her future husband, Doctor Michael Whitehead, then Chief of Hematology at Montreal Children's Hospital. He encouraged her to abandon her broadcasting career and write the novel she had always promised herself she would write. Penny's mother had introduced her daughter to such classic crime writers (see Popular Literature) as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and George Simenon. After a false start in which she attempted to write the novel she thought others expected of her, Penny refocused her efforts and produced a story that she submitted for the British-based Crime Writers Association for their Debut Dagger Award. It placed second in a field of 800 entries. Picked up by a British literary agent and published as Still Life (2006), her debut novel featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec Sureté (see Quebec Provincial Police) became an instant hit with readers around the world.
The widespread appeal of Penny's Gamache series can be traced to several aspects of her books, not least their setting. Rooted in the scenic Eastern Townships of Quebec with their rich historical background, her novels spectacularly put to rest the publishers' canard that stories set in rural Canada will not appeal to readers. Second, Penny's tales are character-driven. The author swims against the literary tide, eschewing a tragically flawed protagonist with a history of troubled relationships. Instead, Armand Gamache is everyone's favorite uncle, or perhaps grandfather, in a loving relationship with his wife, Reine-Marie, and is genuinely caring about the members of his team.
Third, the atmosphere plays an essential role in her tales. The mouth-watering descriptions of sumptuous meals enjoyed by a panoply of engaging and eccentric characters provide readers with an enchanting world in which to spend a few enjoyable hours.
Finally, there is a noticeable absence of gratuitous or graphic violence in Penny's stories. Reflecting Penny's own fascination with the classic Agatha Christie tales, the Gamache novels focus on a puzzle, the solution of which will only be revealed at the very end. Despite the necessity of building her stories around the act of murder, the violence is very much off-stage, her tales reflecting the literature of a gentler, more civilized age.
Louise Penny is currently considered as one of the best mystery writers in Canada. She has won numerous awards, including a CWA Dagger and the Agatha Award (six times), and was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. In 2017, she received the Order of Canada for her contributions to Canadian culture.
The novel won other awards, including the Arthur Ellis Award in Canada for a best first crime novel, the Dilys Award, the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best First Novel in the United States.
(When a peculiar letter arrives inviting Armand Gamache to...)
2018(Most of his best agents have left the Homicide Department...)
2013(No outsiders are ever admitted to the monastery of Saint-...)
2012(When some villagers decide to celebrate Easter with a séa...)
2008"I always wanted to be a novelist and the journalist was the side road, because I was too scared to try. I think I was a combination of I was too afraid to try to write, in case I realized I couldn’t and then I would lose the dream, and also I was very fortunate in my upbringing in that nothing bad ever happened to me. It was lucky from a personal point of view, not so lucky from a novelist point of view. I was fairly callow. There’s a line from Auden in his elegy to Yeats where he says Ireland hurt him into poetry. What a great line. I had to be hurt into novel writing. I had to get to a certain stage. I had to lose enough people, I had to have a lot of ego pounded out of me and pride, I had to learn compassion. I had to do enough vile things that I hated myself, and then was forgiven, so that I had something to write about that wasn’t about how other people perceived me."
Quotations:
"When I write, I write with a stack of poetry books (her recurring character Ruth Zardo is a poet) and a stack of cookbooks. One great way to evoke the (Quebec) setting is through the cuisine, through the food, which changes season by season. What I’m always striving to do, and I’m not sure I always succeed, is drop that fourth wall."
“My characters can’t feel anything I haven’t felt. I know about jealousy, bitterness, self-hatred, anger; I own all that.”
“The great blessing in my life is that I know that goodness exists. But I know, too, that the happiest people in the world have been through hell and come out the other end.”
“My books are love letters to Quebec - the language of my characters is French, and I wanted my characters to live in that language.”
“I was close enough that I could still feel the vestiges of the terror. But I was also feeling that incredible awakening of hope. Of how beautiful the world is and how beautiful people are.”
“What I mean is the outlook on the world, the sense that people can’t change. And that's one of the themes in the books too. People do change, for the worse, but they change for the better too.”
"Fear lives in the head. And courage lives in the heart. The job is to get from one to the other."
"No good ever comes from putting up walls. What people mistake for safety is in fact captivity. And few things thrive in captivity."
"Where there is love there is courage, where there is courage there is peace, where there is peace there is God. And when you have God, you have everything."
"Life is change. If you aren't growing and evolving, you're standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead."
"Life is choice. All day, everyday. Who we talk to, where we sit, what we say, how we say it. And our lives become defined by our choices. It's as simple and as complex as that. And as powerful. so when I'm observing that's what I'm watching for."
"My books are about many, many things, probably least of all murder. They're about life. They're about choices, and taking responsibility for what you do. But really, I think at their heart, they're about love and friendship."
From the ages of 21 to 35, Penny was an alcoholic. “I was very cynical, very bitter; the sort of person who, when I joined the CBC, I hoped I wouldn’t have to work with,” she says now. “Well, I wasn’t just working with her. I was living with her. I was her. I try very hard now to be a decent human being because I’d been an indecent one for a while and I know the difference.” She also added: “I went through a period in my life when I had no friends, when the phone never rang, when I thought I would die from loneliness. I know that the real blessing here isn’t that I have a book published, but that I have so many people to thank.”
As of today, Louise Penny is a person who overcame self-loathing, who published her first book at age 46, who still carries around that universal self-doubt and shares it generously, always with a sense of humor, as well as the occasional expletive. Here is what she has stated about her love of poetry: "Poetry for me is a lot like music. I listen to music because it allows me to get to places emotionally in myself that I couldn’t normally access. Music makes me feel, and the same with poetry. Emerging writers, if they ask for any advice from me, and often even if they don’t, I give them advice to read poetry. I don’t care whether it’s Winnie the Pooh or a greeting card or Yeats and Auden or anyone else. I think poets manage to achieve in a couplet what I struggle in an entire book to achieve."
Louise Penny was married to her late husband, Michael Whitehead, a former head of pediatric hematology at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, for almost 21 years. He was the one who coaxed her to quit her job and fulfill a lifelong dream of writing a novel. Penny lost her husband, who was diagnosed with dementia, in September 2016.
