Eliza
Robertson
Eliza Robertson grew up on Vancouver Island. She studied writing and political science at the University of Victoria, and pursued her MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, where she received the UEA Booker Scholarship and the Curtis Brown Prize. Robertson won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for her first novel, Demi-Gods. She was a finalist in 2014 for the East Anglia Book Award and the Danuta Gleed Short Story Prize for her debut story collection, Wallflowers, and a Journey Prize finalist in 2013 for her short story “My Sister Sang.”
Robertson will be staying at Berton House from April to June 2020, where she will be working on I Got a Name — a literary nonfiction book about Krystal Senyk, who was murdered in Whitehorse in 1992.
Award History
Jury Citation
“A deftly-told story of two eavesdroppers, one a linguist, the other, professionally tuned to acoustics, who listen – over and over – to every scrap of a tragedy. Well-timed and yet still carefully fractured enough to be jarring, Eliza Robertson’s ‘My Sister Sang’ is a marvel of unexpected directions and sharp edges. Even with the distance and detachment of its characters from the centre of its disaster, there is no easy peace, no mere scientific examination of cause and effect: this is writing as carefully crafted and fine as pastry, with thin, perfect layers where every line serves to strengthen the rest.” — 2013 Journey Prize Jury (Miranda Hill, Miguel Syjuco, and Alison Pick)
