The Prairie Novels. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.The Prairie Novels

James Hoffman, George Ryga’s biographer, provides a brilliant guide to the reader of this collection, with a compelling reappraisal of Ryga’s fiction as far ahead of its time. The three short novels included here―Hungry Hills, Ballad of a Stonepicker and Night Desk―draw from the same large canvas of rural, depression-era Alberta. They have similar stark prairie settings and a recognizable array of colourful, cantankerous homesteader and dirt farmer characters, all of whom take us in many pleasurable, disturbing and revealing directions, both historical and mythopoetic. This was a period of obstinate survival farming and boisterous, ethnically diverse community building, redolent with the more questionable aspects of colonial ‘settling’ and ‘breaking’ of the land, in a place that was never unsettled or unclaimed to begin with.

Told in a homey vernacular, each of these three tales evokes a time and place that is as ironically as it is emphatically post-colonial. Ryga offers the reader (and re-reader) characters with a rough-hewn energy for survival and self-determination, and finds in them the beginnings of an authentic prairie culture defined by the anti-colonial struggle that so powerfully marks his work.

George Ryga is one of Canada’s most important playwrights, with a broad international reputation. Born in Deep Creek, Alberta, of poor immigrant parents in a rural Ukrainian community, Ryga had to leave school after the sixth grade. Largely self-taught, he showed early promise when he won a writing scholarship to the Banff School of the Arts. He published his first book of poems in his late teens and earned a living first with hard labour and later in radio broadcasting.

In 1967, Ryga soared to national fame with The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, which has since evolved into a modern classic. A self-proclaimed artist in resistance, Ryga takes the role of a fierce and fearless social commentator in most of his plays, and his work is renowned for its vivid and thrilling theatricality. George Ryga died of stomach cancer in Summerland, BC, in 1987 and will always be remembered and cherished as one of Canada’s most prolific and powerful writers. His memory was publicly honoured at the BC Book Prizes ceremony in 1993.

James Hoffman is professor emeritus of theatre studies at Thompson Rivers University. His research specialty is the theatre history and culture of British Columbia. Most recently he examined the relationship between professional theatre companies in small cities (Kamloops, Prince George, Nanaimo) and their communities. His latest publications include editing of Whose Culture Is It, Anyway? Community Engagement in Small Cities (New Star Books, 2014) and an essay, “Performing Community Action in the Small City: The REDress Project in Kamloops,” in the book, Animation of Public Space through the Arts, Toward More Sustainable Communities (Almedina, 2013).

In addition, he has co-edited Playing the Pacific Province: An Anthology of British Columbia Plays, 1967-2000 (Playwrights Canada Press), Alan Filewod’s Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre (TSC Monographs), and edited George Ryga: The Other Plays and George Ryga: The Prairie Novels (Talonbooks).

He was born in Victoria BC in 1943, educated at University of Victoria, then at New York University where he obtained his PhD in theatre history. He taught post-secondary theatre courses at the David Thompson University Centre in Nelson, East Kootenay Community College in Cranbrook, and Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, where he became chair of the Visual and Performing Arts Department and co-director of the Community-University Research Alliance, which focused on the study of the culture of small cities. He achieved the designation of full professor in 1995 and professor emeritus in 2012.

He is a member of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association.