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 the odd chapter on him in studies about Atlantic Canadian literature. But the publication of a book-length critical study, solely devoted to...