About Michelle Butler Hallett

One of Canada’s most courageous and original literary voices, Michelle Butler Hallett writes novels, plays, screenplays, short stories and novellas.  Her work, at once striking, memorable and difficult to categorize, has been praised by Books in Canada for “economy and power,” while The Globe and Mail notes that “demons are at work – the kind that lurk in the subconscious and surface, depending on the individual, as either despairing visions or acts of outright brutality. … Butler Hallett seems often to be creating from a subliminal place, riding on intuition, unencumbered by the counsel of editors.” Speaking of Butler Hallett’s first novel, Double-blind, the 2008 Sunburst Award Jury said: “Sanity, madness, torture in the name of science — Double-blind is wonderfully original while chillingly based in history. … The writing is incredibly layered, with metaphor and symbol perfectly balanced against the hard neutrality of scientific language.”

For her 2008 novel, Sky Waves, Butler Hallett drew on her radio background and her troubled relationship with history. Sky Waves explores the often funny and often sad human need for – and fear of – meaningful communication. Described by the author as “a demented ‘aural’ culture novel,” Sky Waves is told as a drew, that is, as the ninety-eight meshes in a row of a fishing net. Throughout ninety-eight non-linear but interconnected chapters, several different narrators, characters and storylines are networked together ultimately to work as a story-mural against a timeline of 1901 to 2005.  Sky Waves has been called” a dynamic and shape-shifting work that redefines the project of storytelling”.(Maple Tree Literary Supplement)

Butler Hallett’s 2011 novel, deluded your sailors, due for release in mid-November, unfolds in two distinct and interwoven timelines: the early eighteenth-century New World and ten months of 2009 in a Republic of Newfoundland and Labrador. In 2009, battered but perceptive Nichole Wright, a beginning novelist, scores a commission to write a play for a heavily-funded tourism project. With her customary luck, she discovers documents that will derail the whole project, and she pursues the research with a vicious dedication that hides how fast she’s running, and what she’s running from. The narrative she unearths is the story of an early eighteenth-century girl, daughter of an unnamed prostitute, who reinvents herself as circumstances require, in turns victim, spy, and captain of a Salem trading vessel. Her threadbare disguise is ripped apart when her unacknowledged past meets her tenuous present. Finally forced to reveal many things kept hidden, she refuses to be exploited any further, but such defiance comes at great cost. This parallel storytelling echoes Nichole Wright’s fight to save herself from folly as she dares to open her eyes to the suffering, and the meaning, of others. Tackling, evil, mercy and  the weights of both the past and the present, deluded your sailors is a startling story of violence, loss and love.

Highly anticipated works-in-progress include a new collection of stories and novellas.

Butler Hallett says she wants to write axe-books — “you know, for that frozen sea inside us” — and refuses to apologize for violating genre and gender boundaries.

Michelle Butler Hallett publishes with Killick Press and can be reached at mbutlerhallett@gmail.com.