Margaret Laurence

When Margaret Laurence set out for Somaliland with her engineer husband in 1950, she confronted the difficulty of communication between peoples of vastly different cultures. Yet she came to know the skilled orators, poets and craftsmen of the country, and to share the vision of a people's struggle for survival in a barren land. The Prophet's Camel Bell is part travelogue, part autobiography, part celebration of human nature, and essential reading for anyone who has ever been a stranger in a strange land.

Margaret Laurence, best known for her germinal novels set in the Canadian prairies, is one of the nation's most respected authors. She was also an accomplished essayist, yet today her nonfiction writing is largely unavailable and therefore little known. In Recognition and Revelation Nora Foster Stovel brings together Laurence's short nonfiction works, including many that have not previously been collected and some that have never before been published. These works, including over fifty essays and addresses that span Laurence's writing career from the 1960s to the 1980s, reveal her passionate concern for Canadian literature and for the land and peoples of Canada. Based on extensive archival research, Stovel's introduction contextualizes Laurence's nonfiction writings in her life as a creative artist and political activist and as a woman writing in the twentieth century. The texts range from essays on Laurence's own writings and on other works of Canadian literature to autobiographical essays, several focusing on environmental concerns, to sociopolitical essays and writing advocating for peace and nuclear disarmament. By revealing Laurence as a socially and politically committed artist, this collection of lively and provocative essays illuminates the undercurrents of her creative writing and places her fiction - often informed by her nonfiction writing - in a new light.

Margaret Laurence, best known for her germinal novels set in the Canadian prairies, is one of the nation's most respected authors. She was also an accomplished essayist, yet today her nonfiction writing is largely unavailable and therefore little known. In Recognition and Revelation Nora Foster Stovel brings together Laurence's short nonfiction works, including many that have not previously been collected and some that have never before been published. These works, including over fifty essays and addresses that span Laurence's writing career from the 1960s to the 1980s, reveal her passionate concern for Canadian literature and for the land and peoples of Canada. Based on extensive archival research, Stovel's introduction contextualizes Laurence's nonfiction writings in her life as a creative artist and political activist and as a woman writing in the twentieth century. The texts range from essays on Laurence's own writings and on other works of Canadian literature to autobiographical essays, several focusing on environmental concerns, to sociopolitical essays and writing advocating for peace and nuclear disarmament. By revealing Laurence as a socially and politically committed artist, this collection of lively and provocative essays illuminates the undercurrents of her creative writing and places her fiction - often informed by her nonfiction writing - in a new light.

Morag Gunn is a writer in her mid-forties who lives in a riverside farm in East Ontario. Her eighteen-year-old daughter is suffering from a profound loneliness that she is struggling to understand, causing Morag to contemplate her own past. Through a series of flashbacks she reviews the painful and exhilarating moments from her earlier life: her childhood on the social margins of the small prairie town of Manawaka; her escape from a demeaning marriage into writing fiction; and her travels to England, Scotland and finally back to Canada, where she faces her most difficult challenge – the necessity to understand, and let go of, the daughter she loves. First published in 1974, The Diviners is an evocative, moving exploration of one woman's search for identity.

One of Canada's most accomplished authors combines the best qualities of both the short story and the novel to create a lyrical evocation of the beauty, pain, and wonder of growing up, now available as a Penguin Modern Classic. In eight interconnected, finely wrought stories, Margaret Laurence recreates the world of Vanessa MacLeod--a world of scrub-oak, willow, and chokecherry bushes; of family love and conflict; and of a girl's growing awareness of and passage into womanhood. The stories blend into one masterly and moving whole: poignant, compassionate, and profound in emotional impact. In this fourth book of the five-volume Manawaka series, Vanessa MacLeod takes her rightful place alongside the other unforgettable heroines of Manawaka: Hagar Shipley in The Stone Angel, Rachel Cameron in A Jest of God, Stacey MacAindra inThe Fire-Dwellers, and Morag Gunn in The Diviners.

Ghana, 1956. Nous sommes la veille de l'ind pendance. Nathaniel Amegbe est professeur dans une cole ghan enne plut t m diocre. Johnnie Kestoe est comptable dans une firme textile britannique Accra. Les deux hommes s'affronteront autour de la question de l' africanisation , cette politique de passation des responsabilit s entre Britanniques et Ghan ens. De l'autre c t du Jourdain est le premier roman de Margaret Laurence, cette matriarche de la litt rature. Cette traduction est une invitation d couvrir une facette m connue de l'oeuvre d'une grande crivaine qui, pendant son s jour en Afrique de 1950 1956, a su capter tout l'espoir et les bouleversements impos s par les ind pendances africaines l'ordre du monde. Mais avant tout, il s'agit d'une invitation d couvrir une Afrique f brile, des personnages attachants, le tout crit avec un talent incontestable, dans une pluralit de voix couper le souffle. R flexion sur l'ind pendance, tant int rieure que politique, De l'autre c t du Jourdain annon ait d j les grands romans embl matiques de Laurence, dont, L'ange de pierre et Les devins. Publi en fran ais

The books of Margaret Laurence and Gabrielle Roy are among the most beloved in Canadian literature. In 1976, when both were at the height of their careers, they began a seven-year written correspondence. Laurence had just published her widely acclaimed The Diviners, for which she won her second Governor-General's Award, and Roy had returned to the centre of the literary stage with a series of books that many critics now consider her richest and most mature works. Although both women had been born and raised in Manitoba - Laurence in Neepawa and Roy in St. Boniface - they met only once, in 1978 at a conference in Calgary. As these letters reveal, their prairie background created a common understanding of place and culture that bridged the differences of age and language. Here Laurence and Roy discuss everything from their own and each other's writing, to Canadian politics, housekeeping, publishing, and their love of nature. With a thoughtful introduction by Paul G. Socken, these lovely and intimate letters record the moving, affectionate friendship between two remarkable women.