Aritha van Herk, AOE, FRSC, D.Can.L. (Hon.)
Writer/Editor/Speaker
Professor
Department of English
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta
CANADA
T2N 1N4

Bio for Aritha van Herk

Aritha van Herk is the author of five novels, Judith, The Tent Peg, No Fixed Address (nominated for the Governor General’s Award for fiction), Places Far From Ellesmere (a geografictione) and Restlessness. Her wide-ranging critical work is collected in A Frozen Tongue and In Visible Ink; she has published hundreds of articles, reviews and essays. Her irreverent but relevant history of Alberta, Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta, won the Grant MacEwan Author’s Award for Alberta Writing. That book frames the permanent exhibition on Alberta history, which opened at the Glenbow Museum and Archives in Calgary in 2007; Audacious and Adamant: the Story of Maverick Alberta, accompanies the exhibit. Mavericks was also chosen as the inaugural book in the Calgary Public Library’s ONE BOOK/ONE CALGARY initiative in November of 2010. With George Webber she has published In This Place: Calgary 2004-2011 (Photographs by George Webber, Words by Aritha van Herk) and most recently, Prairie Gothic. She teaches Creative Writing and Canadian Literature at the University of Calgary in Calgary. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a member of the Alberta Order of Excellence. She is a recipient of the Lorne Pierce Medal, awarded to recognize achievement of special significance and conspicuous merit in imaginative or critical literature in Canada, and the Lieutenant Governor’s Distinguished Artist Award.