Trevor Ferguson
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Trevor Ferguson , a.k.a John Farrow, (born 1947) is a Canadian novelist who lives in the Westmount section of Montreal, Quebec. He is the author of nine novels and four plays. He has been called Canada’s best novelist both in Books in Canada and the Toronto Star.
Born in Huron County, Ontario in 1947, he was raised in Montreal from the age of three. In his mid-teens, he gravitated towards Canada’s northwest where he worked on railway gangs, and also began to write, working at night in the bunkhouses.
In his early twenties, he travelled and worked throughout Europe and the United States before returning to Montreal to write. He settled into driving a taxi by night and writing by day until the publication of his first novel, High Water Chants, in 1977, which Dennis Lee called one of the best in the language. His second novel, Onyx John, in 1985, received (arguably) the highest critical acclaim in the history of Canadian literature. Leon Rooke called it one of the five best novels of the twentieth century. Sixteen years later, the novel would become a bestseller in France. Indeed, his work is highly regarded in France, where he’s often cited as being one of the world’s pre-eminent writers.
Extraordinary praise also awaited the publication of his third novel, The Kinkajou. The Timekeeper won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for fiction and is currently being developed for film. A ninth novel, The Earth in its Devotion, is forthcoming soon.
City of Ice, written under the penname John Farrow, has been published in 17 countries and the film option sold. The Vancouver Sun called the book the best ever produced in Canada in genre fiction. The second in the series, Ice Lake, caused the New York library journal Booklist to claim that the series is among the very best in crime fiction today.
In 2002, Trevor Ferguson’s first play, Long, Long, Short, Long was produced by infinitheatre (directed Guy Sprung) in Montreal and has become the first English play in history to be nominated by l’académie québécoise du theatre for a Masque award for best text. It returns to the stage in French in the fall of 2005, at Place des Arts in Montreal. His second play, Beach House, Burnt Sienna, was chosen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Village Theatre West in Hudson in 2002. Co-produced with infinitheatre (dir. Guy Sprung), it enjoyed a highly successful run. A third play, Barnacle Wood, was produced in Montreal, also by infinitheatre, in March of 2004.
Trevor Ferguson is a Past-Chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada. He has been a Writer-in-Residence at the University of Alberta, an invité d’honneur at the Salon des Livres in Montreal, and he was among the Quebec authors invited as special guests of the Paris Book Fair in 1999. In 2002, he was one of the few Canadian writers invited to the Festival of the Americas in Paris. Also in 2002, he served on the faculty of the May Writers’ Studio at the Banff Centre for the Arts. He frequently teaches creative writing at Concordia University, and resides in Montreal.
Works
Novels
- High Water Chants - 1977
- Onyx John - 1985
- The Kinkajou - 1989
- The True Life Adventures of Sparrow Drinkwater - 1993
- The Timekeeper - 1995
- The Fire Line - 1995
- City of Ice (as John Farrow) - 1999
- Ice Lake (as John Farrow) - 2001
Plays
- Long Long Short Long (2002)
- Beach House, Burnt Sienna (2002)
- Barnacle Wood (2004)