2010 Atlantic Canada Reads Book Six: Kathleen Winter’s Annabel, Defended by Laura Repas

A Salty Ink Introduction to Kathleen Winter and Annabel.

Kathleen Winter has written for television — from Sesame Street to CBC documentaries — and is well-known for her former weekly column, Naturally, in The Telegram. Her last book, boYs, a vibrant collection of short stories, won the prestigious Winterset Award for Excellence in Newfoundland Writing, in addition to the hip-assuring Metcalfe-Rooke Award. Her short fiction also appears in many journals, such as Malahat Review, Geist, TickleAce, The Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead and Pottersfield Portfolio, as well as in journals overseas, and she’s been anthologized in places like Rattling Books’ EarLit Shorts, Vol.1. Kathleen Winter’s writing is a mesmerizing combination of crisp, brilliant language, a fine attention to detail, a deep empathy for her well-wrought characters, and an aphoristic, intelligent, world-savvy wisdom.

Annabel is her just-in-stores debut novel, and has already been sold into the US (Grove/Atlantic will be publishing it) and the UK (Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Random House, will be publishing it). Clearly, everyone is excited. It is the story of relationships: parent and child, husband and wife, friends by geographic circumstance, and the external forces that rivet them all. CBC’s Angela Antle has said it might be the great Labrador novel, and Salty Ink will go on record saying it is: her evocative writing reaches a hand out of those pages and hauls you down into an authentic Labrador you’ll feel like you know by sight, smell, sound, and experience.

Paraphrasing Kathleen’s personal website and Anansi’s: Annabel tells the story of a child who was born beyond gender in a hyper-male hunting culture in the 1960s. Surgically altered at birth and given the name Wayne, only three people are privy to the secret — the parents and a trusted neighbour, Thomasina. Together, the adults make a difficult decision to raise the child as a boy named Wayne. But as Wayne grows to adulthood within the hyper-masculine hunting culture of his father, his shadow-self — a girl he thinks of as Annabel — is never entirely extinguished, and is secretly nurtured by the women in his life, as he follows his father along the brutal trapline, not knowing why he longs for beauty. Annabel is a tender story of loneliness and exile, and the body’s insistence on coming home.

Annabel was nominated by, and will be defended by, Laura Repas

Laura Repas is the publicity director at House of Anansi Press, where she has worked since 2002.

Before Anansi she worked for General Publishing for 6 years in a variety of roles.

Laura is a book-lover, publishing-industry lifer, Toronto native, and an East Coast enthusiast.

(Follow the Contest Here: http://saltyink.com/atlantic-canada-reads-competition/)

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