David Demchuk

David Demchuk is a Canadian playwright and novelist,^[1] who received a longlisted Scotiabank Giller Prize nomination in 2017 for his debut novel The Bone Mother.^[2]

Life

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba,^[2] of Ukrainian descent,^[3] he moved to Toronto, Ontario in 1984.

Literary work

His plays have included Rosalie Sings Alone (1985),^[4] If Betty Should Rise (1985),^[5] Touch (1986),^[6] The World We Live On Turns So That the Sun Appears to Rise (1987),^[1] Stay (1990), Mattachine (1991),^[7] Thieves in the Night (1992)^[8] and The Power of Invention.^[9] He received a special Dora Mavor Moore Award in 1986 for Touch.^[10] In 1992, Touch was included in Making Out, the first anthology of Canadian plays by gay writers, alongside works by Ken Garnhum, Sky Gilbert, Daniel MacIvor, Harry Rintoul and Colin Thomas.^[11]

After the mid-1990s, Demchuk stopped writing new plays, concentrating on his work at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and on writing scripts for radio, film and television.^[12] In 1999, he wrote the radio drama Alice in Cyberspace, a contemporary reworking of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which aired for ten episodes on CBC Radio's This Morning.^[13] His other radio dramas included Alaska, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The Winter Market. In June 2012, he became a contributing writer for the online magazine Torontoist.^[14]

The Bone Mother was published in 2017 by ChiZine Publications.^[15] It was the first horror-themed novel ever to receive a nomination for the Giller, an award more commonly associated with conventional literary fiction rather than genre fiction.^[16] The book was a shortlisted finalist for the 2018 amazon.ca First Novel Award.^[17] His new novel, RED X, published by Strange Light, an imprint of Penguin Random House, was released on August 31, 2021.^[18]

Biblio

Plays

• —— (1985). Rosalie Sings Alone.
• —— (1985). If Betty Should Rise.
• —— (1986). Touch.
• —— (1987). The World We Live On Turns So That the Sun Appears to Rise.
• —— (1990). Stay.
• —— (1991). Mattachine.
• —— (1992). Thieves in the Night.

Collections

• —— (2017). The Bone Mother. ChiZine Publications. ISBN 9781771484213.

Novel

• —— (2021). RED X. Strange Light. ISBN 9780771025013.