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Even the Dogs: An Interview with Jon McGregor
Photo courtesy of Penguin Books Canada.
Literature prize juries have been very good to British novelist Jon McGregor. His first novel, Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, was nominated for the 2002 Man Booker Prize and went on to win the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. It was also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. The wins and nominations and critical accolades—and the accompanying sales boost—allowed the then twenty-six-year-old-writer to pursue fiction full-time. His second novel, So Many Ways to Begin (2006), was also nominated for the Man Booker, and his latest, Even the Dogs, is already garnering critical raves back in the UK and is being pegged as an early Booker favourite by some critics. For good reason: Even the Dogs is an eerie, elegiac tale of the passage of a ruined alcoholic’s corpse from an inner-city squat through the hands of various police, ambulance attendants, and morgue workers on its way to cremation.
McGregor is in town today to speak at the University of Toronto’s Isabel Bader Theatre at 2 p.m. as part of the Literature for Our Time lecture series. He will also be appearing for a signing at Ben McNally Books. [email protected] editor-in-chief James Grainger spoke to McGregor about his latest novel, Even the Dogs.
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