Aritha Van Herk

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Aritha van Herk (born 1954) is a Canadian writer and teacher.

She was born in Wetaskiwin, near Edmonton, Alberta. Her parents and elder siblings immigrated to Canada from the Netherlands before she was born. She grew up bilingual, speaking English and Dutch. The immigrant experience strongly influenced her work and a topic important to her is the search for a place to call home. Her books feature rebel women fighting against society and their families.

Van Herk has written eight books, four of them mainstream novels. The others are difficult to categorize, being an uneven mixture of autobiography, literary criticism, history, and description of place. She has published copious short stories, essays and book reviews that have appeared in some of Canada's better-known newspapers, and has edited and co-edited numerous books, many featuring writing by her students. Her work has been translated into several languages.

Since the mid-1980s, she has taught creative writing in the English Department of the University of Calgary.

Contents

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Novels

Judith (1978) (winner of the $50,000 Seal Book Award)
The Tent Peg (1981) (story of a woman who disguises herself as a young man in order to get a job as a bush-cook for a team of geologists who work in the north of Canada)
No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey (1986) (Story of Arachne Manteia who criss-crosses the Canadian Prairies in her black vintage Mercedes, selling underwear and finally disappearing into the Canadian north.)
Restlessness (1998) (published in 1998 is the story of Dorcas who hires a professional killer because she is afraid to commit suicide. The story becomes a reverse Sheherazade and a close inspection of Calgary.)

[edit] Non-fiction

In Visible Ink (1991) (a collection of experimental criticism)
A Frozen Tongue (1992) (a collection of experimental criticism)
Places Far From Ellesmere: Explorations on Site: A Geografictione (1990) (An attempt to combine travel narrative of exploring the Canadian Arctic island of Ellesmere and literary criticism of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina)
Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (2001) (Penguin-paperback published in 2002)

[edit] External links/References

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In other languages