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Karen Connelly (b. 1969) is a Canadian writer and poet originally from Calgary, Alberta. She has writen about her time living in various parts of the world including Greece, Thailand, Burma and Canada. She is the author of seven books of best-selling nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. Connelly is a fluent speaker of six languages and divides her time between her home in rural Greece, travels in Asia, and her home in Toronto, Canada. Jump to: navigation, search 1969 was a common year starting on Wednesday For other uses, see Number 1969. ...
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She identified as a writer very early, and at seventeen won a scholarship as a Rotary Exchange Student. Living in a Thai village for a year set her on a course of writing about what she calls “life in the world”. After Thailand, she returned to Canada for several months, then left, at nineteen, for Basque Spain, where she lived for almost two years. Choosing to decline the university scholarships offered to her, she instead took the advice of older writers, particularly Timothy Findley, and continued living by her wits in Europe, writing about her experiences there as she compiled the letters and journals of her early adventures in Thailand. She also began to take photographs and think more consciously about incorporating the visual into her work. Timothy Irving Frederick Findley, OC , O. Ont. ...
In 1991, she moved to France and settled in Montclar, the Gypsy and North African quartier of Avignon. She sums up Spain and France as the years of one pair of shoes, two pairs of trousers, many books, and lots of wine. She studied French, Spanish, and the literatures of various European countries. These experiences are detailed in the books One Room in a Castle, This Brighter Prison, Grace and Poison, and The Border Surrounds Us . Soon after, an Aegean island in Greece claimed her restless soul. She has lived there, off and on, since 1992. She still considers Greece--and Greek--to be her most familiar place of abode.
In 1993, Karen made her entrance onto the Canadian literary stage. Her book about Thailand Touch The Dragon, A Thai Journal (alternatively titled 'A Dream of A Thousand Lives') won the country’s highest honour for non-fiction writing, the Governor General’s Award. At just twenty-four, Connelly became the youngest winner of this prestigious award.
Interestingly, Touch the Dragon was actually Connelly’s second book. Her first was a collection of poetry entitled The Small Words in My Body , published in 1990. It won the Pat Lowther Award for Best Book of Poetry in 1991.
Though the rewards of early success were very important to her, Karen has also found the attention distracting. Tired of promoting her books--and very thoughtful about the tensions between making artistic works and selling them--she left Canada for Asia once more, returning to Thailand in January, 1996. Over the next two years, she observed the dramatic changes wrought in Southeast Asia by development and tourism; she also went to Burma for the first time and met Burmese writers, artists, and dissidents who, in their various ways, were working against the dictatorship that controls their country.
Her observations about social and economic change in Thailand and her relationships with people in Burma and on the Thai-Burmese border marked the beginning of a new, more serious stage of education, an exploration into the politics of oppression, the politics of dissent, the political role of spirituality--in this case, Buddhism--and the cyclical nature of violence and trauma.
Selected Works:
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