P.E.I.’s Kent Stetson has just received a major appointment.
The award-winning writer is the inaugural artist in residence at McGill University’s Institute for the Public Life of Art and Ideas. During his tenure he will compose the first draft of a new play tentatively entitled Shackled.
“(It’s) happy news,” stated Stetson on his Facebook page early Thursday morning.
Born in Marshfield, P.E.I., and now living in Montreal, Stetson, C. M., is a Governor General's Literary Award Laureate, as well as a Member of the Order of Canada.
The playwright, director and novelist developed as a dramatist in Halifax, before moving to Montreal in 1989, where he became a full-time writer.
His GG Award-winning tragedy in three acts for 15 men, The Harps of God, "a work which raised the bar for Canadian play-writing to a new level,” (GG jury citation) is said to be the single best play ever written about Canada. (Montreal Gazette, 2005)
Stetson recently published his first work of prose fiction, The World Above the Sky. Of the novel, former CNN producer/anchor, and critic for The Village Voice, Porter Anderson said: “Stetson... who's no slouch in the dreaming department, may in fact remind some here of a latter-day J.R.R. Tolkien ... The World Above the Sky charts an arduous journey through Nature-gone-unnatural ... The reddened sands and foaming seas of his constructs churn into a phosphorescent cosmos of grace.”
This first-contact novel set in 1398 on the east coast of present-day Canada is the first in a trilogy associating First Nations and European cosmologies. The Sky World Trilogy is conceived as a platform from which to observe and document the emergent Canadian consciousness.
Stetson's work as mentor, educator in both the classroom and digital domain, and arts activist takes him across Canada and abroad.
He is currently completing his second work of fiction, a crime novel co-written with his retired RCMP brother Paul. Meat Cove is being published serially online. For more information, go to http://www.masterplayworks.com.
