|
CURRENT PROJECTS Click here for more authors represented by Carolyn Swayze Literary Agency
Frances
Backhouse www.backhouse.ca
is a veteran freelance journalist who has written for Audubon, New Scientist, Canadian Geographic and numerous other magazines. Her training and experience as a biologist inform her environmental writing, including her books about owls and woodpeckers. Her other three books reflect her ongoing fascination with Klondike gold rush history. WOMEN
OF THE KLONDIKE (Whitecap Books, 1995)
HIKING
WITH GHOSTS: The Chilkoot Trail, Then and Now
(Raincoast Books, 1999: rights have
reverted.) WOODPECKERS
OF NORTH AMERICA (Firefly Books,
2005) OWLS
OF NORTH AMERICA, (Firefly Books,
2008) CHILDREN OF THE KLONDIKE, (Whitecap Books,
2010). Although the Klondike gold rush was largely an adult event, a few children—from newborns to toddlers to teenagers—were swept up in this amazing, turn-of-the-century adventure. Children of the Klondike will bring their stories together for the first time. Arthur
Black www.basicblack.com
was the popular host of CBC - Radio's Basic
Black for 19 years. His live broadcasts
filled auditoriums across Canada. Arthur continues
to host Weird Homes and Weird Wheels
on the Life Channel and writes a column for
Fifty Plus. His syndicated columns run in
more than 50 Canadian newspapers. He is three-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. PITCH
BLACK A new collection of essays (Harbour
Publishing, spring, 2005). Winner of the Leacock Medal FLASH
BLACK Arthur's humorous collection of laughter
(Harbour Publishing, spring, 2004) BLACK
AND WHITE AND READ ALL OVER a collection of new
comical essays (Harbour Publishing, fall
2004) SALTSPRING ISLAND ON AUDIO (Harbour Publishing,
2009) PITCH BLACK: THE
BEST OF ARTHUR BLACK: selections from the
award-winning backlist (Harbour Publishing, fall
2005, audio fall 2007) BLACK GOLD: Nuggets from a Lifetime of Laughs BLACK TO THE GRINDSTONE (Harbour Publishing, 2008)
Kathy
Buckworth www.kathybuckworth.com,
a former marketing director, is a contributor to
CanadianLiving.com and Today's
Parent. She is the author of THE SECRET LIFE
OF SUPERMOM: The Tricks and Truths About Having It
All (Sourcebooks 2005), which launched a new
comic voice for busy moms. SuperMom
EveryDay, giftbook and calendar, 2006,
Sourcebooks. JOURNEY
TO THE DARK SIDE: Supermom Goes Home The
woman who had it all (children, a busy corporate
and domestic life, a good salary and lots of guilt)
makes the transition to being at home in the
suburbs. THE BLACKBERRY DIARIES. The BlackBerry is a fantastic example of how we can stay linked to a world which involves mostly us, while living in a reality of playdough, tantrums and judgement (that’d be from the other “challenged” Modern Mummies). Like children, however, all is not sunshine and roses with the BlackBerry.
SHUT UP & EAT: Savoring the Joy of Family Bonding Time. Rights Sold: Canada, Key Porter, Spring 2010.
Leah Douglas is a new mother and an avid gourmet. She holds a Ph.D. in social work from McGill University, and she teaches at University of the Fraser Valley. She has worked in health care for many years and is happy to combine her passions for delicious food, healthy living and family life.
The Gourmet Pregnancy is a lighthearted cookbook filled with chic recipes, beautiful photos and inspirational narratives about cooking and entertaining throughout pregnancy. It is a celebration of pregnancy and women’s bodies, with a positive focus on food, eating and socializing. It encourages women to take pleasure in their pregnancy and promotes diverse and healthy food options. Rights
sold: John Wiley & Sons, 2009.
kc dyer (www.kcdyer.com) has published four novels for young adults (Dundurn).
A WALK THROUGH THE WINDOW. Darby Christopher is one cranky teenager. She’s stuck in a one-lobster town for the summer with a pair of weird grandparents and not much to do. A chance encounter with a boy at the end of the street brings some mysterious changes into Darby’s summer. When Darby walks with Gabe through the stone window of an old ruin she finds herself in another world. The window lets Darby look in on the stories of a number of different families as they made their way to Canada - via the Underground Railroad; the coffin ships of the Irish Potato famine; and even the Bering land bridge into North America. Book 2: FACING FIRE. Vignettes in this book tell the stories of West Coast First Nations, Chinese railroad experience and the gold rush in Barkerville. Rights
sold: Canada, Doubleday Canada, 2008
MEG FEDERICO regularly writes humor for the National Post. Her work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Shambhala Sun, and Agni Journal (Boston University Press). She also writes commentary for CBC Radio (which she often performs). For several years, she wrote a highly successful column, “Transitions: Issues in Caregiving,” for The Halifax Daily News. WELCOME TO THE DEPARTURE LOUNGE is a laugh out loud travelogue of the author’s two-year tour of duty as manager of her wealthy parents’ homecare in suburban New York—from her home in Nova Scotia, a thousand miles away. When the author’s eighty year old mother and newly minted step-father were finally forced to accept full-time home care, Federico imagined them settling into a Norman-Rockwellian life of docile dependency but contrary to expectations, her parents turned into terrible teens in a world where gravity didn’t apply. Rights sold: World rights to Random House USA. Canadian publication by Doubleday Canada.
For all territories contact: dcronin@randomhouse.com Mark
Frutkin www.markfrutkin.com
is the author of six books of fiction and three of
poetry. His work has been published in Canada, UK,
US, Holland, and India. FABRIZIO'S
RETURN is a literary novel set in the 17th and
18th-century Italy, in which the Devil's Advocate,
a hard-eyed Jesuit, investigates a candidate for
sainthood. FABRIZIO'S RETURN is described by Alan
Cumyn as "a grand novel full of ossuaries and
telescopes, gargoyles and magic potions,
apocalyptic paintings, angels, comets, violins, of
murmurations of starlings and characters -- such
characters! -- to make you fall in
love." Rights
sold: Knopf Canada (h/c) 2006, Vintage Canada (p/b)
2007; Proszynski, Poland; Inostranka, Russia; Narae, Korea; Editorial ViaMagna, Spain. Will
Ferguson www.willferguson.ca
has been a regular columnist for Maclean's
Magazine and a frequent contributor to
Flare, Globe and Mail and other
publications. He is a popular humourist, chronicler
of Canadian history, politics, and pop culture and
winner of the 2005 Pierre Berton Award for
Popularizing Canadian History. His published books
include BEAUTY
TIPS FROM MOOSE JAW (Knopf Canada), I
WAS A TEENAGE KATIMA-VICTIM (Douglas & McIntyre,
1998), BASTARDS
AND BONEHEADS (Douglas &
McIntyre, 1999), HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO JAPAN (Tuttle
1998), and HOKKAIDO
HIGHWAY BLUES (published in Canada and China as
HITCHING RIDES WITH BUDDHA) an insightful
and witty travel memoir. He is a co-author of GIRLFRIEND'S
GUIDE TO HOCKEY with Teena Dickerson and Bruce Spencer (Key Porter, 1999, new edition 2008) and the editor of THE
PENGUIN BOOK OF CANADIAN HUMOUR (Penguin Canada, 2006). SPANISH FLY is the story of young Jack McGreary who has been raised in the dying town of Paradise Flats during the the dust storms of the Great Depression. Jack has been forced to live by his wits and when a pair a fast-talking con artists blows through town, Jack falls in with them. Together, they go on a crime spree across the American Southwest, staging a number of inventive and often hilarious cons.
WHY
I HATE CANADIANS (220 pp), Canada, Douglas
& McIntyre, 1997, Re-issued 2007 HOW
TO BE A CANADIAN (even if you already are one)
with Ian Ferguson (225 pp), Won the CBA Libris
Award for Non-Fiction Book of the Year. Nominated
for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, and the
Bill Duthie, BC Booksellers' Choice Prize. 175,000
cc sold. Canada, Douglas & McIntyre,
2001, 2007. CANADIAN
HIST0RY FOR DUMMIES 2nd edition, Wiley 2005.
Won the Canadian Authors Association Prize for
History. HAPPINESS™
is a satirical novel about a self-help book
that works. When people begin to lose weight, get
rich, quit smoking and have fabulous sex lives, it
causes Apocalypse Nice. Winner of the Stephen
Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and the Canadian
Authors Association Fiction Prize. Shortlisted for
the Commonwealth Region Prize
(Canada/Caribbean) Rights
sold: Canada, Penguin, 2001 (first published under
the title, GENERICA); Audio,
Canada, Gooselane and sold in over twenty other territories. New paperback Penguin Celebration edition published February 2009. Carla
Gunn www.carlagunn.com
is an educator and writer in Fredericton, N.B. She has written extensively for The Globe and Mail and The National Post and has been heard on CBC radio. In AMPHIBIAN quirky nine-year-old Phineas William Walsh lives in a world of paradox. On the one hand, the adults in his life assure him that everything is just fine while on the other hand, his own steel-trap logic and the Green Channel point to the desperate importance of treating the earth with more respect. Along with the everyday routine of school, playing with his best friend, Bird, sparring with the class bully, and negotiating with his irreverent mother, Phin struggles to convince those around him to consider the evidence of their senses. Much to the chagrin of his teacher, the frustration of his psychologist and the horror of his mother, he stubbornly boycotts products made at the expense of orangutans, talks incessantly about animal welfare and makes saving the class frog his mission.
Rights
sold: Canada, Coach House, 2009, German rights sold to btb bertelsman. Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Canada and Caribbean region). Genni
Gunn www.gennigunn.com
was born in Trieste, Italy. Before turning to
writing full-time, she toured in rock bands (bass
guitar, piano, vocals). Her opera libretto,
"Alternate Visions," was staged in 2004.
A creative writing instructor, she is also a
translator of the works of Italian poet Dacia
Maraini. Genni's THRICE UPON A TIME won the
1990 Commonwealth Prize for the best First Novel
(Canada/Caribbean division). MATING IN
CAPTIVITY won the Gerald Lampert Prize for
Poetry. She is also the author of TRAVELLING IN
THE GAIT OF A FOX and ON THE
ROAD. TRACING
IRIS (268 pp) is a complex and exciting
literary novel in which a social anthropologist
searches for her mother. Rights
sold: Canada, Raincoast Books, 2001 (rights reverted); optioned for
film, 2007; Excelsior 1881, Italy. HUNGERS
(234 pp) is a mesmerizing collection about
yearning, vice and the dark side of
love. Rights
sold: Canada, Raincoast Books, 2002 (rights reverted). ALTERNATE VISIONS: http://www.chantslibres.org/site.html
an opera libretto half in French and half in English. Spring 2007 FACELESS
a new poetry collection explores landscapes that are fascinating and treacherous, haunted by faces that are obsessively worn and shed, torn off and replaced. Rights
sold: Canada, Signature Editions, 2007 In SOLITARIA,
a family discovers that Vito, the brother they thought living in South America, is actually dead, and has been for years. And, even stranger, their sister has been pretending to receive letters from him for decades. Set in southern Italy in 2002, and spanning two decades, Solitaria is a journey through loss, deception, memory and desire.
The influence of Hannah Holborn’s various parents—foster and otherwise—has lent her fiction a unique blend of British humour, Slavic melancholy, naturalism, and First Nations sensibility. She has taught life skills to aboriginal women, inner city youth, and the mentally ill, and is a recipient of a Canada Council Grant for the Arts. Her prize winning stories have appeared in numerous journals including "Room of One's Own" and "Front and Centre". She is writing a novel in Gibsons, British Columbia.
FIERCE: Fresh, tough, and thoroughly addictive, this sparkling debut collection calls to mind the beloved and bestselling works of Lisa Moore, Camilla Gibb, and Mark Haddon.
RIGHTS SOLD: Aislinn
Hunter www.aislinnhunter.com
is a personable Vancouver-based teacher of creative
writing, with a wealth of experience in arts
broadcasting. Her poetry and fiction reflect her
fascination with Ireland. WHAT'S
LEFT US a collection of six stories and a
novella (200 pp) was nominated for the Danuta Gleed
Award and received the 2003 Foreword
Magazine Silver Medal for Fiction. The book was
also shortlisted for the Re-Lit prizes. Rights
sold: Canada, Polestar Books, 2001; French language
for the novella Les Allusifs, 2004; Finland,
Karisto Oy 2001 INTO
THE EARLY HOURS a poetry collection, won the
Gerald Lampert Award and was shortlisted for the
Dorothy Livesay Award. Rights
sold: Canada, Polestar Books, 2001. Rights will revert 2008. STAY
(269 pp), a dazzling first literary novel in
which a young Canadian woman has a love affair with
an older disgraced Irish academic, was shortlisted
for the Books in Canada/Amazon.ca Best First Novel
Prize. Rights
sold: Canada, Polestar Books, 2002 (rights will revert 2008); UK/Irish
rights, New Island Press, 2003; film rights
optioned by Bright Lights Pictures THE
POSSIBLE PAST a poetry collection of great
poise and insight, looks at actual historical
events and people through a post-modern lens.
Shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay and Pat Lowther
Prizes for Poetry. Rights
sold: Canada, Polestar Books, 2004. Rights will revert 2008. Pamela Klaffke www.pamelaklaffke.com is a former journalist, who now works as a novelist and photographer.
Her first book, Spree: A Cultural History of Shopping (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003), has been published in North America, the UK, Australia and China, and her online serial photonovel, Halfsquatch, debuted in May 2008. Her photography has been published in international art magazines and images from her Bestia Parvulus series have been licensed by Italian fashion brand, Diesel. Pamela is also the founder and chief curator of the Secret Society of Analogue Art. She lives with her daughter in Calgary, Canada.
SNAPPED! Sara B. is having a meltdown. She's teetering on the edge of forty and struggling to maintain her persona as Montreal's premier trend-spotter. Snapped! careens through Sara's world as she drinks, smokes, stirs up social melodrama, and becomes increasingly unhinged. She trips from one ridiculous situation to the next, along the way having unexpected encounters with a scheming assistant, a chatty life coach, an cute bar owner, a kind-hearted old lady, and a Rockabilly paper boy in this darkly comic story about a woman who thinks she's losing her cool. Rights
sold: World, Mira Books, publish date 2010. EVERY LITTLE THING follows Mason McDonald who blames her mother’s tell-all newspaper columns for her career instability, her lack of friends and the countless disastrous dates she’s suffered. But when her mother unexpectedly dies Mason is torn between her mother’s legacy and her own appetite for fame and penchant for exhibitionism. Mason must dig fully through the past to find her future and as she traces her life in her mother's footsteps she stumbles into fantastical scenarios of what her life could have - would have - been if, rather than rebelling, she’d listened to her mother.
Rights
sold: World, Mira Books, publish date 2011. Jen
Sookfong Lee, www.sookfong.com
a Vancouver poet and food writer
who attended UBC's Booming Ground Summer Writing
Program.
MISS VAL AND THE SHUTTERBUG opens in 1958, when a chance meeting in a Chinatown alley between Danny Lim, then a young boy temporarily escaping his duties at his father's curio shop, and Miss Val, a longtime
burlesque dancer at the end of her career, sets the trajectory for a friendship that resumes in 1982, when Danny and Val meet again at what appears to be an unremarkable wedding.
TRACEY LINDBERG is of Cree-Metis ancestry. She has a doctoral degree in law as well as law degrees from the University of Ottawa, Harvard Law School and the University of Saskatchewan. She has published on numerous academic subjects.
BUFFALO GAL is Bernice Meetoos, a big Cree woman from northern Saskatchewan. When a tragedy occurs in her family home, she begins to travel to B.C. on a vision quest. The Frugal Gourmet has been coming to her in dreams and telling her ingredients. Paired with this is her desire to meet Pat Johns (Jesse from The Beachcombers), who is, as Bernice says, a working, healthy Indian man. Part road trip, dream quest and travelogue, the novel touches on the universality of women's experience, regardless of culture or race.
To be published by HarperCollins Canada, 2010. All other rights Catherine.Macgregor@harpercollins.com. Andrea
MacPherson www.andreamacpherson.com
is a UBC MFA graduate. Her fiction and poetry have
been widely published in literary magazines. She is
a past editor of Prism International. She teaches Creative Writing and English with University College of the Fraser Valley, and has taught at Malaspina University College, Douglas College and SFU's Writing & Publishing Program. BEYOND
THE BLUE spans the years 1879-1918 in Dundee,
Scotland, as the lives of Morag, her two daughers
and a fey young niece, echo seminal events of their
times -- the Tay Bridge disaster, WW I, the
suffragette movement, the Easter Uprising, and the
influenza scourge. Morag, a worker in the Bowbridge
Jute Mill tries to keep her family intact. Rights
sold: Random House Canada, spring
2007 WHEN
SHE WAS ELECTRIC (251 pp) is an intensely
passionate first novel which takes place on a small
BC farm during the heat wave of 1939. Three
generations of women and the neighbouring Indians
mix echoes of the past, secrets, and the impending
threat of war. Rights
sold: Canada, Polestar Books, 2003 NATURAL
DISASTERS a collection of poetry. " Andrea
MacPherson knows where desire and grief, inextricably bound, lodge in the
body, and she knows that language can awaken memory to make "wings beat
against the chest." Rights
sold: Canada, Palimpsest Press, 2007
AWAY a second collection of poetry. Rights
sold: Canada, Signature Editions, 2007
LISA PASOLD (www.lisapasold.com) is a freelance journalist and Paris-based tour guide who writes about travel, architecture and culture. She has two books of poetry published by Frontenac House. She also explores North America in her 1967 Buick Skylark.
RATS OF LAS VEGAS is a confident novel about Millard Lacouvy, an unusual young woman whose quick hands and flair for poker take her from Depression-Era Vancouver to the post-war mob town of Las Vegas. Millard is a kid playing for dimes at the local saloon and washing laundry at the Hotel Vancouver when an offer from an accomplished gambler sets her star rising. From rags to riches, her life is haunted by childhood friend and sometimes lover Teddy Ahern, a bad boy who always turns up at the worst time and usually needs Millard to bail him out of trouble. Rights
sold: Canada, Enfield & Wizenty,
2009. Karen
Rivers www.karenrivers.com
is the author of books that have been nominated for
national and regional prizes. Her essays for teens
have been included in two anthologies for teens
published by Annick Press (2001, 2002). She published DREAM WATER a juvenile novel in 1999 (Orca) and SURVIVING
SAM (Polestar, Canada and US) in 2001 THE
TREE TATTOO is an adult literary novel
which leads to sudden moments of insight where
language opens unexpected doors. "This is a book
full of passion and restraint in which people try
to make bargains with God but are draw by passion
and need toward dangerous, defiant
acts." Rights
sold: Canada, published by Cormorant Books, 1999,
rights have reverted The Carly Series (middle-grade fiction):
The
Haley Harmony series (teen fiction): THE
HEALING TIME OF HICKEYS(2003) XYZ Trilogy (teen fiction, Raincoast Books, Canada and US):
Nelsa Roberto is a mild-mannered civil servant by day and ferocious teen fiction writer/hockey mom/van driver by night.
Illegally Blonde. When Lucinda de Amaral comes home with newly bleached blonde hair all she expects is a major lecture from her strict Portuguese parents. What she doesn't expect is the revelation of a shocking secret that her family are illegal aliens who are being deported from Toronto in less than a week. Lucy's desperation to return to her 'real' home results in a reckless plan to buy a fake passport which ensnares her in a web of illegal activity that threatens more than her journey home. But it's when she unexpectedly falls for a guy whose connection to his home is centuries old that she finally realizes you can never really hide from your roots – not even if you bleach them. Rights Sold:
Great Plains Teen, Canada, 2009. Michael
V. Smith www.michaelvsmith.com
is a UBC MFA grad, who is a screenwriter,
poet and cabaret performer known as Miss Cookie
LaWhore. WHAT
YOU CAN'T HAVE, a collection of poetry
exploring desire and longing in its many forms.
Signature Editions, spring 2006. CUMBERLAND
(295 pp) is a literary novel in which set in a
dying mill town where lonely people look for love
and some form of family. With highly favorable
reviews (see author's web site), this sophisticated
work was shortlisted for the books in
Canada/amazon.ca Best First Novel Award. Rights
sold: Canada, Cormorant books, 2002 PROGRESS
Rights
sold: Canada, Cormorant books, 2009. Publication date Spring 2011. Mark
Zuehlke www.zuehlke.ca
is a career author with numerous guide books and
fact books to his credit. He is best known for his
meticulously researched and accessible military
histories. He is the recipient of the 2007 Thompson Rivers University Distinguished Alumni Award.
Elias
McCann series about a lay coroner. Published by Dundurn, Castle
Street Mysteries
Arthur Ellis prize winners. Each title is a tai chi move. Hands Like
Clouds (2000), Carry Tiger to Mountain (2002), and Sweep Lotus (2004).
CANADIAN BATTLE SERIES Published
by Douglas & McIntyre Canadians
in the Italian Campaign. Canadians
in the Normandy Campaign. TERRIBLE
VICTORY: First Canadian Army and the Scheldt Estuary Campaign
September 13-November 6, 1944. (2007).
FOR
HONOUR'S SAKE: The War of 1812 and the Brokering of
an Uneasy Peace The military, diplomatic and
political history leading to a pivotal event in
Canada-US relations. Winner: Lela Common Canadian Authors Prize for History. Rights
sold: Knopf Canada, fall 2006
Brave Battalion: The Remarkable Saga of the 16th Battalion (Canadian Scottish) in the First World War presents the story of four Canadian Scottish regiments that were banded together as the 16th Battalion.
Rights
sold: John Wiley & Sons, fall 2008
SCOUNDRELS,
DREAMERS & SECOND SONS: British Remittance Men
in the Canadian West - revised second edition. Rights
sold: Canada, Dundurn Press, 2001. THE
GALLANT CAUSE: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War
1936-39. Personal accounts of those who
fought against facism. Among their numbers were Dr.
Norman Bethune and Jean Watts, one of the few women
to volunteer in the legendary International
Brigades. Published
by Whitecap in 1996; Wiley Canada
2007 THE
CANADIAN MILITARY ATLAS: The Nation's Battlefields
from the French and Indian Wars to Kosovo with
cartographer C. Stuart Daniel. Published
by Stoddart in 2001, re-published
as FOUR CENTURIES OF CONFLICT: FROM NEW FRANCE TO
KOSOVO by Douglas
& McIntyre, fall 2006
|
Home | About Us| Submissions |