Jane Urquhart

Jane Urquhart, LL.D (born June 21, 1949) is a Canadian novelist and poet. She is the internationally acclaimed author of seven award-winning novels, three books of poetry and numerous short stories. As a novelist, Urquhart is well known for her evocative style which blends history with the present day. Her first novel, The Whirlpool (published 1986), gained her international recognition when she became the first Canadian to win France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (Best Foreign Book Award). Her subsequent novels were even more successful. Away, published in 1993, won the Trillium Award and was a national bestseller. In 1997, her fourth novel, The Underpainter, won the Governor General's Literary Award. Early life Urquhart was born June 21, 1949, in Little Long Lac, a small mining town in northern Ontario. She is the daughter of a mining engineer, Walter Andrew Carter, and Marian Quinn. Quinn grew up on a farm with a large family of six brothers and one sister. After their marriage, the couple moved to Little Longlac for Carter's work. It was there that they had three children, Urquhart being the youngest and their only daughter. The family's heritage made a lasting impact on Urquhart's writing. Her mother's Irish ancestors were immigrants who arrived in Canada in the mid nineteenth century during the Great Famine. Both of Urquhart's parents had witnessed the trials of World War I and World War II. With such a background, Urquhart's childhood was filled with the stories of Ireland and settlement in Canada. "The women are the people who pass the stories down through the generations in any family," Urquhart says. "Occasionally, one of the men would tell a story. When they did, it was a very exciting event, and it was often war-related. But the women were constantly gossiping. I've always been a great believer that gossip is not an evil thing. I see it as an investigation of human nature." Education Urquhart attended John Ross Robertson Public School until the end of Grade Seven, moving to Havergal College, a private school for girls, for grades eight to twelve. After that, she attended a junior college in B.C. for one semester before enrolling at the University of Guelph. In an interview, Urquhart recalls that very little of her childhood education touched on Canadian history or Canadian literature. "We were very much a colony when I was in...school, and so the past as I knew it survived in a physical sort of way.