Photo credit: Ted Bowen
Gail Bowen, assistant professor of English at the Saskatchewan
Indian Federated College, a noted playwright, and YWCA Woman of
the Year alumni, won the 1995 Arthur Ellis Best Crime Novel Award
for her fourth novel in the popular Joanne Kilbourn series A
Colder Kind of Death.
Kilbourn has much in common with her creator: both are teachers
at Saskatchewan universities, sometime TV panellists, and
both have several children and a one-time politically connected
husband. Bowen’s
closeness with her character infuses Kilbourn with an extraordinary
believability. She receives tons of mail saying that “Joanne
is like someone you could have coffee with. She’s intelligent,
fun, and capable – she’s pretty much like most of the
women I know.”
Readers also empathize with the way Bowen addresses prairie urban
life and work, the realistic and dimensional portrayal of contemporary
Indigenous peoples, and complex family interactions alongside every-day
domestic details.
Says Bowen, “I grew up with an extremely strange mother and
its one of those things where you can either let something like
that push you down under the waters forever or it can become, as
Carl Jung would say, something that feeds your life. And I think
it’s fed my life. I mean, I will never understand her, but
the kind of energy that comes from an unresolved relationship with
a mother drives everything I write.”
Bowen, who learned to read by age three from tombstones in Toronto’s
Prospect Cemetery, has had a number of her novels adapted to television
movies.
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