Genni Gunn
Author Bio
GENNI GUNN is a writer, musician and translator. Born in
Her opera, Alternate Visions, produced by Chants Libres premiered in Montreal in 2007 (music by John Oliver) and was projected in a simulcast at The Western Front in Vancouver; and her poem, Hot Summer Nights, has been turned into classical vocal music by John Oliver, and performed widely internationally.
Genni’s works have been finalists for the CBC Literary Awards in all three categories: fiction personal essay and poetry; the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Thrice Upon a Time; the Gerald Lampert Award for poetry collection Mating In Captivity; the Premio Internazionale Diego Valeri for literary translation for poetry collection Traveling in the Gait of a Fox; and the John Glassco Translation Prize for poetry collection Devour Me Too. She has received two Praxis Film Development Fellowships for her screenplays.
Her novel, Tracing
Iris, has been optioned for film and is in development with TRACING IRIS PRODUCTIONS INC.
Genni’s novels have been taught at U.B.C., the University of Lethbridge and the University of Guelph, and have been the subject of PhD theses in Canada, and translation theses in Italy. Several of her stories appear in post-secondary textbooks such as Breaking Free (Prentice Hall), Cultures in Transition (McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited), and Pens of a Different Colour: a Canadian Reader (Harcourt, Brace Janovich). Her work has been anthologized both nationally and internationally, and her short stories have appeared in The Journey Prize Anthology (McClelland & Stewart), Best Canadian Stories (Oberon Press), and the now defunct renown American journal Story.
She has performed at hundreds of readings
and writers’ festivals, including Calgary’s Wordfest, Winnipeg’s Thin Air, and Vancouver’s International Writers’ Festival. She has
delivered workshops for writers Canada-wide, most recently 2009 Writers and Writing: Professional Development Workshops during
February and March 2009, beginning in Charlottetown and ending in Vancouver. Genni has been interviewed on
Before she turned to writing full-time, Gunn toured Canada extensively with a variety of bands ( bass guitar, piano and vocals).
Her new novel, Solitaria, will be published by Signature Editons in Fall 2010. She is at work on a collection of stories and another novel.
Gunn has a B.F.A.
and an M.F.A. from the University of British Columbia. She is a member of the Writers' Union of Canada, The Literary Translators
Association of Canada, and Pen International.