Lisa Moore: First Canada, Now the World

Photo Credit: Bojan Furst. http://bojanfurst.com/

Lisa Moore is CanLit royalty and the reigning queen of Newfoundland fiction. Those are big shoes to fill, but they fit her perfectly. She looks good in them.  

She’s played a massive role in shaping and shining a spotlight on the vivacity of fiction coming out of Newfoundland this decade, and on a national scale, there aren’t many other contemporary Canadian authors who have done as much to raise the bar for sentence-level writing in CanLit. There is an evocative elegance in her diction that I’m plain jealous of and inspired by.

Lisa’s first book of shorts, Degrees of Nakedness, had all the right people taking note of what the Globe and Mail referred to as her “supple, sensuous prose.” There was a crisp flair, a fresh new way of wielding language and thought, and in 2002 she outdid herself, and 99% of short fiction books published this decade, when she released Open. AKA the bible for contemporary short fiction. Amazon.ca included it on their top 50 books of the decade, and it was the first collection of shorts to make the Giller shortlists this decade as well. When it was shortlisted for the Giller in 2002, it was only the fourth book of shorts to have the honour in 9 years of the prize’s running, and that supports my claim that Open‘s widespread fanatic reception was the ripple that started the wave of acceptance for short fiction in recent years. Michael Posner at the Globe and Mail nailed it when talking about Lisa’s writing, in his review of her multi-award-winning debut novel, Alligator. “[Alligator] reads like the literary version of some artfully arranged visual collage.”

So she’s conquered Canada. She’s a Globe and Mail and Quill & Quire Book of the Year regular, a bestseller, a household name on the tip of every emerging writers’ tongue, and the Giller, Pssh, she’s been shortlisted twice.

And along came February in 2009. I read that novel and it was the first time I knew I was reading the work of a fully evolved writer. What she does with language is nothing less than dazzling. What she does with language is pure art. Pure innovation. With all the right words and nuances, moments and memories are fleshed out and almost x-rayed, until the reader is made to experience her protagonist’s very core and consciousness. Lucid is the word I am after, her scenes dance right off the pages and all over your heart. Especially when you have the chance to hear her read her own work.  

The legendary Richard Ford on Lisa Moore:  ”Lisa Moore is an astonishing writer. She brings to her pages what we are always seeking in fiction and only find the best of it: a magnetizing gift for revealing how the earth feels, looks, tastes, smells, and an unswerving instinct for what’s important in life.” 

And now that she’s got Canada conquered, she’s taking over the world. February, like Alligator, made this week’s IMPAC longlist reveal. The IMPAC being the world’s ”largest prize for single work of fiction in the English language,” and if it isn’t the biggest or most esteemed international book award, the Booker Prize certainly is, and February was also a finalist for that this year too. Not to mention February was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ prize (Canada and Caribbean Region) and was a New York Times’ Editor’s choice. It’s all pretty amazing and much-deserved.

I recently congratulated Lisa on all this international recognition, and asked her about reactions to it. Here’s what she has to say:

Lisa Moore: “I was thrilled to hear about these nominations. It’s nice to know that strangers who live far, far away can relate to writing that comes from Newfoundland. It’s kind of a magical thing that borders are permeable when it comes to writing. There’s a ton of luck involved when it comes to getting nominated for any prize. A lot of it has to do with all sorts of strange and changing variables – how a particular judge relates to a particular kind of subject matter,  what sort of common life experiences the judges have had, the weather, what’s topical. Every reader brings his or her own experiences to a book, and that’s another magical thing about writing – how it changes in each reader’s imagination, becomes a new thing. There are so many good books out there that don’t get onto prize lists, just because there isn’t enough room for every good book. It is equally thrilling when a careful reader says to a writer – I’ve felt what you described. I have been through something like that. I loved your book. Sometimes those sorts of things happen – a face to face encounter with a reader who enjoyed your book and that is also a complete thrill.”