André Alexis
André Alexis is a Canadian novelist, playwright, and short story writer whose debut novel Childhood (1997), a story of one man's attempt to find balance between a thirst for knowledge and the power of love, won the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award and was a co-winner of the Trillium Award (shared with Alice Munro).
He was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago and immigrated to Canada with his sister in 1961. Alexis’ most recent novel Fifteen Dogs won the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Awards. Alexis began his career as a playwright-in-residence for the Canadian Stage Company where he released a short play Lambton, Kent in 1995. His first published work of fiction, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa (1994), was short-listed for the Commonwealth Prize (Canada and Caribbean region). In this collection of short stories, Alexis provides a philosophical examination of the mysterious interiors of the human psyche by inviting his reader into the dark and dreamlike spaces in which his characters carry out their everyday lives.
In 2005 Alexis published Ingrid and the Wolf, his first work of juvenile fiction, which was a shortlisted nominee for the Governor General's Award for English-language children's literature. In 2014 Alexis published Pastoral, the first in a planned series of five novels on philosophical themes. Fifteen Dogs, the second novel in the series, was published in 2015. The third novel, The Hidden Keys, is slated for publication in 2016. Alexis lives and works in Toronto, where he has hosted programming for CBC Radio, reviews books for The Globe and Mail, and is a contributing editor for This Magazine.
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