A Compelling Voice

It never ceases to amaze me how often academics overlook this country’s major writers.

Consider the facts: in the past 37 years, David Adams Richards has published more than a dozen novels, several works of non-fiction, a handful of plays and two collections of short stories. He has won the Giller Prize, two Gemini awards for screenwriting and a Governor General’s Award for fiction as well as one for non-fiction, which only a handful of writers have managed to achieve. And yet, despite Richards’s long list of literary accomplishments and cultural contributions, Tony Tremblay’s David Adams Richards of the Miramichi: A Biographical Introduction is the first full-length study ever to be published on the author.

To be fair, over the past few decades critics have been writing essays about Richards’s work, as well as...