Award Winning Author: Sheldon Currie

Sheldon Currie was born in Reserve Mines in 1934. After high school in Cape Breton and some time in the RCAF and a variety of jobs he went to university and became a teacher first in high school and then in university. He received a BA and a B.Ed from St. F.X. University, and MA from the University of New Brunswick, a Ph.D from the University of Alabama, and an honourary degree from St. Thomas University. He is now a retired professor of English and has written short stories, novels, plays and film scripts. His collection of short stories, "The Glace Bay Miners' Museum", was published by Deluge Press in Montreal in 1981, and the title story became the basis for the movie, Margaret's Museum and for the novel also entitled "The Glace Bay Miners' Museum", published by Breton Books in 1996. It was adapted as a radio play for CBC and as a stage play by Wendy Lill. The stage play has been in continual production since 1995 in Canada, the US and Britain. His novel, The Company Store, published by Oberon, 1988, was transformed into a radio play for the CBC and a stage play by Mary Vingoe for Mulgrave Road Theatre. He has transformed two short stories, "On Parle Par Coeur" and "Dies Irae" into a feature film script entitled "Two More Solitudes", supported by a crossover grant from Telefilm.

He has written two plays based on his short stories, "Lauchie Liza and Rory", and "Two More Solitudes", both produced by Festival Antigonish in 1997 and 1998. Lauchie Liza and Rory in an expanded version was produced by Mulgrave Theatre in 2004 and toured Nova Scotia and played in Edmonton at Canada's national summer festival, Magnetic North. It was nominated for five Merritt awards and awarded the Merritt for best play by a Nova Sciotia writer in 2004. A third play, Anna's Story, is based on the novel "Down the Coaltown Road" and was produced by Festival Antigonish in 2001 and by Eastern Front Theatre, Dartmouth, in 2002.

He has written literary articles on the fiction of Flannery O'Connor and David Adams Richards. He has won several awards for fiction including The Okanagan Award for fiction in 1982 and the Breton Books award for fiction in 1996. He has been fiction editor for the Antigonish Review for the past two decades. His most recent collection of short stories, "The Story So Far", was published by Breton Books in 1997. His latest novel is "Down the Coaltown Road", based on the internment of Italian Canadians in Cape Breton in the 1940's during World War Two and has been optioned by the film company Black Maria Productions in Toronto.

Selected List of Publications

Lauchie, Liza and Rory ( a play ). Winnipeg, J. Gordon Shillingford ( Scirocco Drama ), 2004.

Down the Coaltown Road. Key Porter Fiction, 2002. ISBN 1-55263-482-5.
Nominated for the 2003 Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction.
     

"The Glace Bay Miner's Museum." Atlantica: Stories from the Maritimes and Newfoundland. Lesley Choyce, Ed. Goose Lane Editions, 2001. ISBN 0-8692-309-0.
     The Story So Far. Breton Books, 1997. ISBN 1-895415-21-7.

"...one must recognize Currie's command of vernacular. . ., his potentially allegorical plots and characters, and his powers of description."
     - "Currie proves mastery of form." George Elliott Clarke. The Sunday Herald, 21 June 1998.

The Glace Bay Miners' Museum - The Novel. Wreck Cove, Cape Breton, Breton Books, 1995. ISBN 1-895415-05-5.

The Company Store. Ottawa, Oberon Press, 1988.

"As The Company Store is currently constituted, one can read it from beginning to end as a traditional novel or one can open the volume at almost any chapter and experience the sort of intensely realized and self-contained world that one associates with the offerings of Alice Munro."
     - from "The Company Store." Review by Alistair MacLeod. The Antigonish Review, No. 76, Winter 1989.

The Glace Bay Miners' Museum. (Collection of short stories). Montreal, Deluge Press, 1979.