Lynn Coady

Background

Lynn Coady was born on January 24, 1970, in Port Hawkesbury, Nova Scotia, Canada. Her parents are James and Phyllis (maiden name, Tom) Coady. Coady was adopted into a large family in the small industrial town of Port Hawkesbury, Cape Breton.

Education

Lynn Coady attended Carleton University and received a bachelor's degree in 1992. She later received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of British Columbia in 1998, where she completed her first novel, Strange Heaven while holding a fellowship in the creative writing program.

Career

Coady was an instructor at Simon Fraser University's Writing and Publishing Program. In 2006 she moved to Edmonton and taught creative writing at Athabasca University where she developed a new course in writing the short story and in 2007 moved to Toronto to work at Anansi Press.

Coady’s debut novel Strange Heaven (1998) established her as a strong voice in Canadian fiction and was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Literary Award. Coady subsequently won the Canadian Authors Association Air Canada Award for the most promising writer under age thirty, as well as the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction. Strange Heaven, a coming-of-age story that has some autobiographical elements, displays Coady’s instantly recognizable narrative voice: abrupt, wry, perceptive and shockingly funny. Spurning traditional expectations of Maritime fiction as elegiac and quiet, Strange Heaven is a raucous survey of teenage pregnancy, mental illness, domestic chaos, and aimless small-town delinquency.

A collection of short stories, Play the Monster Blind, surveying thematic territory similar to that of Strange Heaven, followed in 2000. In 2006, Coady wrote Mean Boy. The novel is a first-person account of 19-year-old Lawrence Campbell during his first year of university in a small New Brunswick town. The year is 1975 and Campbell has dreams of becoming a poet. He was drawn away from his rural Prince Edward Island home by the allure of studying with his poet hero, Jim Arsenault, a character based on the real-life Canadian poet John Thompson who taught at Mount Allison University. As Campbell progresses through the year, much of Arsenault's shine wears off and Campbell learns that people are not always what one expects, but rather are complex and multi-dimensional.

Coady's 2011 novel The Antagonist concerns the life of Gordon Rankin, Coady's fictional character known more commonly in the novel as Rank. The character reflects how being cast as a hockey goon and tough guy impacted his life. In response to a novel written about him by an old university, friend Rank dedicates himself to providing his own account of events from his past. The reader is brought into Rank's world and exposed to his hurts, joys, and ultimately the realization that one must narrate their own lives and reject the labels others may try to give you.

Coady's 2013 book, Hellgoing is a collection of short stories, each about characters going through their own personal versions of hell. Despite this, the stories prompt laughing far more often than tears.

In addition to her achievements as a writer, Lynn Coady has written plays, which have been staged across the country. She has edited the anthologies Victory Meat: New Fiction from Atlantic Canada (2002) and The Anansi Reader: 40 Years of Very Good Books (2007), and co-edited The Journey Prize Stories 20: The Best of Canada's New Writers (2008) with Heather O'Neill and Neil Smith. Her stories, essays, and articles appear in national magazines and newspapers, including The Globe and Mail, where she writes the "Group Therapy" column. She is also one of the founding editors of the award-winning magazine Eighteen Bridges. In 2005, she received the Canada Council for the Arts' Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for outstanding achievement by an artist in mid-career.

Since 2014 Lynn has worked on such TV series as Orphan Black, Sensitive Skin, Michael: Every Day, Mary Kills People, The Disappearance and Burden of Truth.

Achievements

• Coady has been awarded the Canadian Authors Association/Air Canada Award for the best writer under thirty, as well as the Dartmouth Book and Writing Award for fiction. Her articles and reviews have been featured in many publications, including Saturday Night, This Magazine, and Chatelaine. She has written several plays and contributes regularly to The Globe and Mail.
  
  Her 2011 novel, The Antagonist, was shortlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize and published in the US by Alfred A. Knopf. She has published six books of fiction and her work has appeared in the UK, Germany, Holland, and France. Recently her short story “Mr. Hope” appeared in issue #47 of McSweeney's Quarterly.
  
  In 2017, Coady was announced as a juror for the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Works

More photos

• audiobook

  • Hellgoing

    (A young nun charged with talking an anorexic out of her r...)

    2013

• book

  • The Antagonist

    (A piercing epistolary novel, The Antagonist explores, wit...)

    2011
  • Play the Monster Blind

    (Funny, poignant and smart, full of unforgettable characte...)

    2000
  • The Saints of Big Harbour

    (In "Saints of Big Harbour," Guy Boucher, a fatherless tee...)

    2002
  • Mean Boy

    (Earnest, small-town Lawrence Campbell is fascinated by hi...)

    2006
  • Strange Heaven

    (Strange Heaven is tearfully hilarious, as funny and appal...)

    1998

Views

Lynn Coady once borrowed a man’s life to create another. In her 2006 novel, Mean Boy, Coady based the character of Jim Arsenault, the larger-than-life poet, and professor, on John Thompson, a troubled British-Canadian poet and professor whom she admired greatly. After the novel was published, Coady read at Mount Allison University in Sackville, where Thompson had taught until his death in 1976. Some of Thompson’s friends and former colleagues were in the audience, and at the end of the reading, let Coady know they didn’t appreciate her using Thompson’s life in her fiction.

Quotations: "What I'm saying is, a lot of boys don't bother growing into men because they don't have to - their bodies have already done it and it turns out that's all anybody requires."

"Let's not confuse traditional behaviors with good manners. The definition of etiquette is gender neutral - it simply means we strive at all times to ensure a person in our company feels at ease."

"Grownups, as a rule, should always be ready to pay for their own meals - or else ready to graciously accept their date's insistence on paying. The point is, one doesn't sit there batting one's eyelashes, fully expecting someone else to claim the bill."

"Something I've always written about is social expectations: that the eyes of the community are on you all the time, expecting you to line up with certain social norms, certain behaviors. Whenever you forgot about them, they'd be strongly reiterated to you, in no uncertain terms."

"Loneliness sucks. It's a slog. It feels wonderful and exhilarating when someone makes it go away. But love is a whole different ball game."

Membership

Lynn Coady is a member of The Writer’s Union of Canada and The Playwright's Union of Canada.

• 

  The Writer’s Union of Canada

• The Playwright's Union of Canada

Personality

Physical Characteristics: Lynn Coady has a height of 5 feet 2 inches. She has dark brown hair and dark brown eyes.

Interests

• Writers

  Alice Munro, Helen Oyeyemi, Flannery O’Connor

• Music & Bands

  Joanna Newsom, Wilco, Lou Reed, The Vaselines, Gillian Welch, Lisa Germano, Ugly Casanova

Connections

At 18, Coady gave a child up for adoption. Lynn Coady is married to Charles Barbour. She has lived in a number of cities within Canada, including Fredericton, Vancouver, Edmonton, and Toronto.

Father:

James Coady

Mother:

Phyllis (Tom) Coady

Spouse:

Charles Barbour

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 189
  2001