Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalist
Michael Christie
The Beggar's Garden
HarperCollins Publishers
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About the Book
A bank manager, a crackhead, a web designer, and a car thief are some of the curiously interrelated characters of Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside that drift though each others’ lives in this collection of nine linked stories. Michael Christie’s fiction is about people who are searching in the jagged margins of life, such as the title story in which Sam Prince befriends a panhandler who has been incarcerated in a mental hospital for most of his life, and “Discard” in which Earl leaves food in dumpsters for his homeless grandson Kyle to find.
About the Author
A one-time professional skateboarder, Michael Christie worked in a homeless shelter in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for five years. He received an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. The Beggar’s Garden is longlisted for this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize. He divides his time between Galiano Island, British Columbia and Thunder Bay, Ontario.
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