Person

Gaston, Bill

1953-

Bill Gaston was born in 1953 in Flin Flon, Manitoba and has lived in a number of cities across Canada, including Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, and Fredericton. He studied at the University of British Columbia, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts (1975), a Master of Arts (1978), and a Master of Fine Arts (1981). As a young man, he worked as a logger, fishing guide, and, briefly, as a professional hockey player in France. He has taught English and Creative Writing at Canadian universities including the University of British Columbia (1982-1984), Seneca College (1986-1987), Mount Saint Vincent University (1988-1990), Saint Marys University (1988-1990) and the University of New Brunswick (1991-1996), where he served as director of the creative writing program and editor of the literary journal The Fiddlehead. In 1998, he began teaching in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria. Gaston is the author of several celebrated novels, including Tall Lives (1990),The Cameraman (1994; rev. ed. 2002), Bella Combe Journal (1996), The Good Body (2000), Sointula (2004), and The Order of Good Cheer (2008). His one work of non-fiction, published in 2006, is entitled Midnight Hockey: All About Beer, the Boys and the Real Canadian Game. He published his first collection of short fiction, Deep Cove Stories, in 1989, and has since written several othercollections: North of Jesus Beans (1993), Sex is Red (1998), Mount Appetite (2002), and Gargoyles (2006). A number of his stories have been read on CBC Radio and the CBC has commissioned screenplay adaptations by Gaston of two of his stories, Saving Eves Father and The New Brunswicker. Gaston has also authored the plays Yardsale, Ethnic Cleansing, and I am Danielle Steel, and a collection of poetry, Inviting Blindness (1995), which was originally his thesis for his Master of Fine Arts. In 1999, Gaston was given the Canadian Literary Award for Fiction for his short story Where it Comes From, Where it Goes. He was nominated in 2002 for both the Giller Prize and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for Mount Appetite. In 2003, he won the inaugural Timothy Findley Award, given to a male Canadian writer in mid-career. In 2004, he received a ReLit Award and a second Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize nomination for his novel Sointula. He was awarded the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize and a second ReLit Award for his collection of short stories, Gargoyles, which was also nominated for the Governor Generals Award for Fiction in 2006. Gaston lives on Vancouver Island with his wife, writer Dede Crane. Gaston and Crane have four children: Lise, Connor, Vaughn, and Lilli.