Camilla Gibb

Camilla Gibb (born February 20, 1968) is an English-born Canadian writer who currently resides in Toronto.

Camilla Gibb
Gibb at the Eden Mills Writers' Festival in 2015
Born (1968-02-20) February 20, 1968
London, England
OccupationNovelist
Alma materAmerican University in Cairo
University of Toronto
Oxford University
Notable awards2001 City of Toronto Book Award, 2006 Trillium Book Award
Children1
RelativesSheila Fennessy (mother), Duncan Gibb (father)

Early life and education

Born in London, England, she grew up in Toronto, Ontario and studied at North Toronto Collegiate Institute and Jarvis Collegiate Institute. She attended the American University in Cairo before receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies from the University of Toronto and a Doctor of Philosophy in social anthropology from the University of Oxford.[1] She left academia in 2000 in order to pursue writing full-time.

Career

Gibb gained recognition as a writer with the publication of her first novel, Mouthing the Words, in 1999. She wrote it while living in her brother's trailer home, working on a borrowed laptop, after receiving a $6,000 gift from a benefactor. In 2000, the novel won Gibb the City of Toronto Book Award, and in 2001, she won the CBC Canadian Literary Award for short fiction.[1][2]

Gibb's second novel, The Petty Details of So-and-So's Life, was published in August 2002.[1]

Gibb's third novel, Sweetness in the Belly (2005), is set against the backdrop of the Ethiopian Revolution and largely takes place in the ancient walled city of Harar. It was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2005, longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award and won the Trillium Award for best book in Ontario in 2006. It is currently in production as a film starring Dakota Fanning, Yahya Abdulmateen II and Kunal Nayyar.[3]

Her fourth novel, The Beauty of Humanity Movement was published in Canada in September 2010, and in the US and the UK in spring 2011.

Gibb's memoir, This is Happy, was released in Canada on August 18, 2015.[4]

Personal life

Gibb's father Duncan, a man she describes as "prone to manic outbursts and destructive, paranoid and cruel", but also intelligent and full of projects, disappeared when she was in her early twenties. She had very few contacts with him until his death.[5]

In 2009, Gibb separated from her partner, Heather Conway, after almost ten years together. Gibb was pregnant at the time; she later gave birth to a daughter.[4][6][7] Her 2015 book This is Happy is a memoir that explores what the word "family" means to her, from the family she grew up in to the one she had to build with her child.[8][9]

Selected works
  • Mouthing the Words (Pedlar Press (Canada), Carrol and Graf (US), William Heinemann/Vintage (UK), 1999)
  • The Petty Details of So-and-So's Life (Doubleday Canada, 2002, Vintage UK)
  • Sweetness in the Belly (Doubleday Canada, 2005, William Heinemann/Vintage UK, Penguin Press US)
  • The Beauty of Humanity Movement (Doubleday Canada, 2010, Atlantic Books UK, Penguin Press US)
  • This is Happy (Doubleday Canada, 2015)

References
  1. Canadian Who's Who. University of Toronto Press. 2004. p. 478.
  2. "The Current Transcript for August 10, 2017". CBC. August 10, 2017. Archived from the original on December 25, 2018. Retrieved December 25, 2018.
  3. "Variety".
  4. Donaldson, Emily (August 22, 2015). "Camilla Gibb carves out her own kind of happy". The Star. Toronto.
  5. Gibb, Camilla (April 16, 2018). "Camilla Gibb had heard from her father once in 30 years - and then the hospital called". CBC. Archived from the original on December 25, 2018. Retrieved December 25, 2018.
  6. Houpt, Simon (July 25, 2014). "Does Heather Conway have what it takes to save the CBC ?". Coalition pour la diversité culturelle. Archived from the original on March 8, 2016. Retrieved September 7, 2015. Originally published in the Globe and Mail.
  7. Demers, Patricia. "CanWWR: Biography of Camilla Gibb". Women Writing and Reading in Canada from 1950. Retrieved September 7, 2015.
  8. Balkissoon, Denise (August 22, 2015). "Review: Camilla Gibb chronicles her search for connection in This Is Happy". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved December 25, 2018.
  9. Grassi, Laurie (July–August 2015). "Novelist Camilla Gibb looks back on troubled times in This Is Happy". Quill & Pen. Archived from the original on December 25, 2018. Retrieved December 25, 2018.
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