25th Trillium Award

Trillium Testimonial: Stephen Marche

 
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This year marks the 25th Anniversary of Ontario's illustrious Trillium Book Award/Prix Trillium. To celebrate this silver milestone, Open Book has asked members of the literary community to tell us what they love about their favourite award-winning Trillium title. If you're looking for a recommended read (or re-read), follow these Trillium Testimonials on Open Book: Ontario from now until the winners of the 2012 award competition are announced. Today, author Stephen Marche tells us why he's chosen Andre Alexis’s Childhood (McClelland and Stewart), winner of the 1997 Trillium Book Award.

Open Book:

What do you love about this book?

Stephen Marche:

I adored Childhood by Andre Alexis. It's a very simple story told through the most complex means; a book shot through with hidden and elusive meanings; a book of clandestine beauties. (The sonnet structure of the chapters, for example.) It made a profound statement that a person's life is about unseen or hinted patterns in the general hubbub of events and that you can't really know people unless you already know them. Brilliant conception, brilliantly executed.

Stephen Marche is the author of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea (2007) and Raymond and Hannah (2005). He currently writes "A Thousand Words About Our Culture," a monthly column for Esquire magazine, which in 2011 was a finalist for the ASME National Magazine Award for Commentary, in addition to opinion pieces for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Salon.com, The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. He received a doctorate in Early Modern Drama in 2005 from the University of Toronto.

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