Lingering on Posted Land: An Interview with Leon Rooke

Abstract

o ^^^^^ or each of Leon Rooke's nearly three hundred published sto^^^^^ ries, there are another two unpublished. Those six hundred, -^M. Rooke would say, represent the more interesting part. Rooke was born in 1934 in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. He and his wife, Constance, moved to Victoria, British Columbia, in 1969, before settling down in Eden Mills, Ontario, where he founded the Eden Mills Literary Festival in 1989. He began his career producing plays and wrote scripts such as Krokodile (1973) and Sword play (1974). He has published numerous short-story collections, including Last One Home Sleeps in the Yellow Bed (1968), The Love Parlour (1977), Cry Evil (1980), Death Suite (1981), Sing Me No Love Songs, I'll Say You No Prayers (1984), A Bolt of White Cloth (1984), and The Happiness of Others (1991). He has been awarded the CanadaAustralia Literary Prize (1981), the Governor General's Award for English-Language Fiction for his novel Shakespeare's Dog (1983), the W. O. Mitchell Prize and the ReLit Fiction Award (both in 2002), and the CBC Literary Prize (2003). His other fictional works include Fat Woman (1980, shortlisted for the Governor General's Award and the Books in Canada First Novel