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Canada's Next Top Author

Kelli Korducki

How a creative-writing program that admits just seven students a year is cultivating the country’s next generation of literary giants.

Ghalib Islam is a slight 32-year-old whose unassuming demeanour belies the brilliant literary career that likely awaits him. Fire in the Unnameable Country, the author’s debut novel released this spring by Penguin, has become one of the year’s most hotly debated works of Canadian fiction.

Islam’s book is unconventional, to say the least: at one point, its narrator, who happened to have been born on a flying carpet, turns into an owl. The story takes readers on a dystopian journey through an unspecified, if vaguely Middle-Eastern, country under the grip of thought surveillance. The book’s publisher has said that, upon receiving Islam’s manuscript, there was a sense that they had found Canada’s George Orwell.

But U of T found him first.

Though many years in the making, Fire in the Unnameable Country took shape in the university’s two-year creative writing MA program. Islam, who earned his degree in 2006, was among the program’s first graduates. It was during his studies that he completed the first draft of his novel. U of T is also where he befriended fellow student and author Jonathan Garfinkel, who would connect Islam to both his literary agent and eventual publisher. Islam’s academic advisor – and reason for applying to U of T in the first place – was none other than Margaret Atwood.

"We get about 10 applicants for each available place, so the competition is very intense," says the program's director, Richard Greeene, a professor of English at U of T Mississauga.

Read the full story in the Summer 2014 issue of U of T Magazine >