Writers
Deni Ellis Béchard is novelist, journalist, photographer, and the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, including Vandal Love (Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and a selection for Oprah’s summer reading list); Into the Sun, a novel about the civilian surge in Afghanistan (Midwest Book Award for literary fiction and chosen by CBC/Radio Canada as one of 2017’s Incontournables and one of the most important books of that year to be read by Canada’s political leadership); Of Bonobos and Men (Nautilus Book Award for investigative journalism and Grand Prize winner); Cures for Hunger, a memoir about his father who was a bank robber (an IndieNext pick and one of the best memoirs of 2012 by Amazon.ca); Kuei, my Friend: a Conversation on Racism and Reconciliation, an epistolary book of nonfiction coauthored with First Nations poet Natasha Kanapé-Fontaine; White, a novel exploring the legacy of colonialism and the impact of neocolonialism in the Congo and in Canada; and My Favorite Crime: Essays and Journalism from around the World. Of his most recent novel, A Song from Faraway, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “Tough of mind and tender of heart, its beauty is wholly entrancing.” Béchard lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.