Quick Facts
Biography
Carellin Brooks is a Canadian writer, whose debut novel One Hundred Days of Rain won the Edmund White Award in 2016 and the ReLit Award for Fiction in 2017.
Background
Originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, after a tumultuous childhood, Brooks became a ward of the state. Placed with loving foster parents, she lived in Salt Lake City, Utah until age 14, when she ran away from her foster home and moved to Ottawa, Ontario to live with her grandmother. She completed high school in Ottawa, and was a regular youth columnist for the Ottawa Sun.
After high school, she studied English and anthropology at McGill University in Montreal. While at McGill, she won the national Book City/Books in Canada Student Writing Award for poetry in 1992 and hosted a weekly radio show, Dykes on Mikes, on CKUT-FM.
She was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1993, and was reported at the time as the first person ever to have won a Rhodes scholarship while having been out as lesbian on her application. After completing her studies at Oxford University, she returned to Vancouver, becoming a columnist for Xtra West and a book reviewer for the Vancouver Sun. She later became managing editor of the Vancouver-based publishing company New Star Books, and is a writing instructor at the University of British Columbia.
Writing
She has published the non-fiction books Every Inch a Woman: Phallic Possession, Femininity, and the Text (2005), Wreck Beach (2007) and Fresh Hell: Motherhood in Pieces (2013), and edited the anthologies Bad Jobs: My Last Shift at Albert Wong's Pagoda and Other Ugly Tales of the Workplace (1998) on her own and Carnal Nation: Brave New Sex Fictions (2000) as coeditor with Brett Josef Grubisic.
Every Inch a Woman was a shortlisted Lambda Literary Award nominee in the LGBT studies category at the 19th Lambda Literary Awards in 2007.
One Hundred Days of Rain was the winner of the 2016 ReLit Award for Fiction and the Publishing Triangle’s 2016 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction.
Works
Written
- Every Inch a Woman: Phallic Possession, Femininity, and the Text (2005, ISBN 978-0774812108)
- Wreck Beach (2007, ISBN 978-1554200313)
- Fresh Hell: Motherhood in Pieces (2013, ISBN 978-1927335321)
- One Hundred Days of Rain (2015, ISBN 978-1771660907)
Edited
- Bad Jobs: My Last Shift at Albert Wong's Pagoda and Other Ugly Tales of the Workplace (1998, ISBN 978-1551520551)
- Carnal Nation: Brave New Sex Fictions (2000, ISBN 978-1551520834)