They were homesteading, clearing land never before used for agriculture, in an isolated northern Saskatchewan community of immigrant Mennonites like themselves when I, their last child, was born. Rudy Wiebe: All writers face this question, “Where are your stories?” My family came to Canada as refugees from the USSR in 1930. From the beginning, western Canada has been the locus of all your fiction what is it about this region that resonates with you and drives your writing? Image: You’ve said that early in your writing career you discovered that it was as legitimate to write about a kid growing up in the Canadian bush as on the streets of New York. He lives in Edmonton with his wife, Tena.

Tarr Award for contribution to Christian literature. He has received five honorary doctorates, and in 2007 he won the Leslie K. In 2000 Wiebe was named an officer in the Order of Canada. He received the Writer’s Trust Non-Fiction Prize for Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman (Knopf Canada, 1998), which he wrote with Yvonne Johnson, and the Charles Taylor Prize for his memoir Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest (Knopf Canada, 2007). He has twice won Canada’s Governor General’s Award, for The Temptations of Big Bear (McClelland and Stewart, 1973) and A Discovery of Strangers (Knopf, 1994). Wiebe’s books and stories have been published in thirteen languages and received numerous awards. Wiebe’s Mennonite ancestry is a prominent subject in his fiction, as are western and northern Aboriginal peoples. His latest book, Come Back (Knopf Canada, 2014), is his tenth novel and twenty-fifth book. He taught at Goshen College in Indiana in the sixties, then returned to Canada to teach creative writing and literature at the University of Alberta until retirement in 1992. Wiebe studied literature at the University of Alberta and the University of T ü bingen, Germany. In 1947 Wiebe’s family moved to southern Alberta. His parents had fled Russia in 1930 and became part of the last generation of homesteaders to settle the Canadian West. Rudy Wiebe was born in 1934 in Speedwell, a small Mennonite community in northern Saskatchewan.

By peace shall destroy many