Shaena Lambert

Photo: Canadian Books and Authors

Shaena Lambert is a Vancouver writer who has spent time in New York and Toronto and has taught creative writing at the Humber School for Writers. Her novel Radiance (Virago 2007), concerns the post-war "Hiroshima Maiden" Keiko, an eighteen-year old atomic bomb survivor who is brought to the US for plastic surgery, and Daisy, her childless home stay "mother" whose life is forever changed by the puzzling young woman whose scars refuse to heal.

The author told John Burns of the Georgia Straight how the novel began to take root when in 1986, as an organizer of the Vancouver Centennial Peace Festival, she was asked to display some objects that had belonged to the dead of Hiroshima.

Radiance was selected as "Best Book of the Year," by the Globe and Mail, Quill and Quire and two New Zealand newspapers, and got great reviews in the UK. It was a finalist for the Rogers/Writer's Trust Fiction Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and Ontario's Evergreen Award.

In 2009, when Shaena was a guest at the Vancouver Branch of the Canadian Authors Association, I was fascinated to hear her read the scene of Keiko's arrival and talk about the process of generating beginnings and endings for fiction.

Shaena is passionate about story making. Writing, she says, is a melding of craft and mystery. A great encourager of other writers, she's the current Fiction Mentor at the Writers' Studio, Simon Fraser University. Meeting her there last year, I was delighted to learn she was a fellow fan of the brilliant British novelist Ford Madox Ford.

A short story collection, The Falling Woman (2002) was published in Canada and the UK, and also in Germany as Die Fallende Frau. It was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Award. Other Lambert short stories have appeared in Zoetrope, The Vancouver Review, Ploughshares, The Journey Prize Anthology and Best Canadian Short Stories 2011.