Howard Norman is an award-winning author and educator whose books have been translated into 12 languages. He has written seven novels: My Darling Detective (2017), Next Life Might be Kinder (2014), What is Left the Daughter (2010), Devotion (2007), The Haunting of L (2002), The Museum Guard (1998), The Bird Artist (1994), and The Northern Lights (1987). His new novel, The Ghost Clause, will be available early in 2019. Norman’s most recent memoir is I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place (2013), and he will publish another in 2019 entitled Forms of Prayer in Vermont. Norman has received the Lannan Award in Literature, the Whiting Writers Award, the New England Book Award, and the Harold Morton Landon Prize in Translation from the Academy of American Poets, as well as a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Norman attended Western Michigan University Honors College and went on to study at the Folklore Institute of Indiana University. He has a storied background as a translator for the World Society for the Protection of Animals, a member of the fire crew in Manitoba, Canada, and as a field naturalist. He was Goucher College’s Writer in Residence, and a Marsh professor at University of Vermont. He currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland.
Norman’s fiction is as raw and majestic as the Canadian territories about which he writes. The harsh splendor of the Northern regions interlaces with the turbulence of Norman’s characters: their survival, their will. Publishers Weekly describes Norman’s work as “[wringing] beauty out of stone and eloquence out of simplicity….[He] convinces you that human nature is a perennially absorbing puzzle, and that the hands of an accomplished writer can worry the solutions in fresh, surprising and altogether memorable ways.”
