ERIN SOROS (Canada)

Born and raised in Vancouver and now living in the UK, Erin Soros wears many hats.

She trained in the theatre at the University of British Columbia, worked as a puppeteer, and then for a decade as a community advocate based in the Downtown Eastside, first as a rape crisis counsellor for victims of sexual violence and then as a coordinator of literacy programs for at-risk youth. These programs were developed in collaboration with refugee and multicultural organizations and with First Nations communities, both in urban centres and on provincial reservations.

Her Master’s thesis in English Literature at UBC explored how people narrate collective and individual trauma. This work won the Governor General's Gold Medal and the Carol Coates Literary Award.

Erin then moved to New York where she enrolled as a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University, completing an MFA in Writing and Translation. While at Columbia she designed and taught courses that explored the relationship between philosophy and social justice. She spent her summers travelling the BC coast to interview retired loggers and to research labour conditions in the 30s and 40s. Her fiction builds on this oral and archival history. Her essays explore ethical and social crises, bringing together autobiographical narrative, psychoanalysis and continental philosophy. These hybrid works have been published in international journals and anthologies.

Her stories have also been published internationally and have been produced for the radio by the CBC and the BBC as recipients of the CBC Literary Award and the Commonwealth Prize for the short story. In 2008 her short story 'Surge' was produced for the BBC as a finalist for the BBC National Short Story Award. Erin has been a writing fellow at several universities in the US and the UK, including the University of East Anglia, where she is now completing a PHD and teaching courses on such topics as psychoanalysis, modern literature, and human rights.