Tamas dobozy biography

Canadian writer

Tamas Dobozy is a Canadian writer and professor at Wilfrid Laurier University.^[1]

Early life

Dobozy was born in the city of Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada.^[2] Between the ages of 3 and 18 he lived in Powell River, British Columbia, and subsequently in Victoria, Montreal, Budapest, Vancouver, Toronto, and St. John's. He received his BA/BFA in English/Creative Writing from The University of Victoria, his MA in English from Concordia University, and his Ph.D. in English from the University of British Columbia.^[2]

Career

Dobozy taught at Memorial University^[2] and currently teaches in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario.^[1]

Awards and honors

Bibliography

References

Tamas Dobozy is a Canadian writer of Hungarian descent. He has published over fifty short stories in periodicals such as "Agni," "One Story," "Fiction," and "Granta," as well as winning an O Henry Prize in 2011 for "The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kalman Once Lived." He has published three books of stories, "When X Equals Marylou," "Last Notes and Other Stories," and "Siege 13: Stories," the last of which won the 2012 Rogers Writers' Trust of Canada Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Awards: Fiction. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario, and teaches in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. His work frequently deals with the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War, issues of immigration (particularly with Hungarians), the disjunction between North American and European "versions" of history, and the ethics and intricacies of writing, music, and art.

Interview

Tamas Dobozy talks about gallows humor, inside-out epiphanies, and conveying collective trauma through narrative.

Reviewers have called Siege 13 a "novel-in-stories."  What can linked story collections accomplish that conventional novels or unlinked collections cannot?
The writer Jack Hodgins wrote a great blurb for the Canadian edition of this book that claimed the form of the short story cycle is better for the material I deal with—multi-generational family stories, collective trauma, diaspora—because it captures the chaos of the times. I think this form is better able to present the fragmentary aspect of history. Unlike fragmentary novels (and there are a lot of these too), each story is complete in itself and yet situated in the book as a whole in a way that defies overall completeness. A novel can't really do this. It either tells an overarching story or presents fragments, but it can't do both in the way the short story cycle can. These stories zero in on an instant while the larger