Hamilton writer, musician, and multimedia artist, Gary Barwin is the author of 22 books including the nationally bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates, winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award. His poetry includes For It is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems, ed. Alessandro Porco (Wolsak and Wynn, 2019.) A new novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted will appear in spring 2021.
Bawrin is a three-time recipient of Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year, has received the Hamilton Arts Award for Literature, and has co-won the bpNichol Chapbook Award and the K.M. Hunter Artist Award. A PhD in music composition, he has been writer-in-residence at several universities and libraries and has taught widely. His work has been performed, exhibited, and published internationally.
Gary Barwin was faculty at Banff Centre's 2020 Winter Writer's Retreat.
Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and nominated for the Governor-General's Award for Literature, a hilarious, swashbuckling yet powerful tale of pirates, buried treasure and a search for the Fountain of Youth, told in the ribald, philosophical voice of a 500-year-old Jewish parrot.