Ray Smith (Canada)
leser fra en av sine romaner

Ray Smith, born 1941, is from Mabou, Nova Scotia, Canada. Mabou is a beautiful village on the west coast of the island of Cape Breton, and is famous as the home of fine Scottish fiddlers, dancers, and singers, most notably The Rankin family. As a boy, Ray lived in several Nova Scotia towns, but from age ten in Halifax, where he attended Dalhousie University. After graduation in 1963, he moved to Toronto, and in 1968 to Montreal where he has lived ever since. He teaches English literature at Dawson College.

His first book, a short story collection entitled Cape Breton is the Thought Control Centre of Canada (1969), burst upon a largely uncomprehending world. Post-modern in character, it is noted for astonishing invention and wit. "It is a book of acrobatics, slight of hand, and enormous sophistication.... Most of the conventions of fiction have been included at least once -- everything from detective stories to Jorge Borges -- but somewhere along the line they´ve gone haywire."

His first novel, Lord Nelson Tavern appeared in 1974. "With style, wit, a magic ear for language and a great comic sense of the bizarre, Ray Smith fills Lord Nelson Tavern with a delightful carnival of fantastic people and establishes himself as an important The novel shifts deftly in time and place, beginning with a group who were university students together and following them as their lives tumble, collide and burst with love, sorrow, pain and boundless energy." Century (1986) is widely regarded as Ray´s finest novel. Again, it is made up of linked stories. "Beginning with the nightmare
visions of a young woman named Jane Seymour and her search that ends too soon, the reader becomes caught up in a chronicle of the Seymour family that moves from Austria, America and Africa to Edinburgh and Venice -- back through Paris of the Belle Époque and forward to Germany of 1923."

The award winning A Night at the Opera (1992) is set in the small German city of Waltherrott, and is a bizarre excursion from the 1980´s back to 1848, the year of revolutions, then back to the time of the Black Death in the late 1340´s. "A Night at the Opera is a startling comedy, a tour de force of the unexpected, the bizarre, the serendipitous. It is a delightful cavalcade of fools and knaves, grouches and maniacs, frumps and tarts, heroes and clowns. And through it all drifts the captivating music of Carl Maria von Stumpf, the most brilliant, yet most shamefully neglected composer of that most preposterous of art forms -- the opera."

"The Man Who Loved Jane Austen (1999) is a penetrating story of a Montreal with only the lingering effervescence of its past, a Montreal of loss, of regret, of sadness, where nationalism corrodes every event, every relationship, every soul. A Montreal of liesand betrayals."

In addition Smith has written widely for newspapers and magazines in Canada and Britain. His fiction has been adapted produced for stage and radio, and selections have appeared in numerous anthologies, and some has been translated into French, Dutch, German, Czech, and Polish.

An accomplished and entertaining reader of his own work. Ray Smith has done 250 readings across Canada, in the USA, England, Scotland, France, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.