All the Lonely People

Overview

Callaghan's writing is wide ranging but often takes on the perspective of a marginalized individual's view of the human experience. These tales are told in a variety of voices: street hustlers, priests, blues singers, Holocaust survivors, cross-dressers, paramilitary snipers, even those we may euphemistically consider the "ordinary"—all of them authentic, and all would subscribe to the maxim that "happiness is overrated." The dialogue is true to speech as it is spoken, shot through with humour, piercing sadness and puzzling beauty.

Author Biography

Barry Callaghan, the well-known novelist, poet, and man of letters, is included in every major Canadian anthology, and his fiction and poetry have been translated into seven languages. His works include The Black Queen Stories, The Way The Angel Spreads Her Wings, When Things Get Worst, A Kiss Is Still A Kiss, Barrelhouse Kings, Between Trains, and Beside Still Waters. He has published translations of French, Serbian, and Latvian poetry, and has been writer-in-residence at the universities of Rome, Venice, Bologna, and Mexico City. He was a war correspondent in the Middle East and Africa in the 70s, and at the same time began the internationally celebrated Exile: A Literary Quarterly and full book press, Exile Editions. For thirty-eight years, he was a professor of contemporary literature at York University in Toronto, and is now Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Scholar at that institution. Callaghan has been awarded the Foundation For The Advancement of Canadian Letters award for fiction, the City of Toronto Award, seven National Magazine Awards, two President's Medal Awards for Excellence (NMA), the ACTRA Award for television host of the year, the Pushcart, White, and Lowell Thomas Awards in the U.S., and the inaugural W. O. Mitchell Award for a body of work. Callaghan has also been awarded honorary doctorates by the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the University of Guelph.