Page Updated On:
11/20/2006
The author
W. Paul Anderson
Anderson left Canada in his early twenties and spent fifteen years travelling
in Asia, studying in Europe, teaching in Latin America, along the way logging
25,000 miles of coastal and ocean sailing, having twice crossed the Atlantic
as a delivery sailor, and has partnered in a sailing charter operation
in the Caribbean. He has worked as a deckhand in Monte Carlo, fruit picker
in Switzerland and construction worker in Australia.
Excerpts have appeared in Queen Street Quarterly and Prairie
Fire, in the Banff Writer’s Studio anthology Rip Rap, and
in the cultural supplement of the Mexico City daily La Crónica. In
1996, Calgary’s legendary One Yellow Rabbit performance theatre
toured a dramatic reading adapted from the manuscript by the author,
and performed in the convent where Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
the central character of the novel Hunger’s Brides, lived
out her life. Anderson lives for the moment in Canada.
Hunger's Brides has been a selected as a Kiriyama Pacific-Rim
Prize Notable Book, finalist for a Commonwealth Writers prize, and finalist
for a W.O. Mitchell Prize. In 2005, Hunger's Brides was
named Writers Guild of Alberta novel of the year.
The shadowy author revealed:
3 video excerpts of
the author and Random House Canada Publisher Anne Collins in conversation
with Carolyn Weaver, host of the TV program Fine Print: Where books
can take you.
Suspected aliases
W. Paul Anderson has denied — predictably — that
he is also Paul Thomas Anderson (director of Magnolia), Paul WS Anderson (director
of Resident Evil: Apocalypse), Poul Anderson (science fiction icon) or
Billy-Paul Anderson (brother of Canada's own Pamela).
As one would expect, then, Paul
Anderson denies any relation to the Tennessee strongman of the same name. World
and Olympic weightlifting champion (1956), superhuman exponent of the squat — at
about the time when the official world record was 650 pounds, Anderson (or
Anderson) squatted 1160 on the Ed Sullivan show and regularly did ten reps
of 800 in training.
"If you don't bend those legs and do those squats, you'll never reach
your potential."
— Paul Anderson
(The most cursory analysis of their writing styles reveals similarities
obvious even to the non-specialist.)
And as to Anderson's farcical denials, we respond only with this:
