Escalator 2011/12 winner: Erin Soros
Erin Soros is one of ten winners from our 2011/12 Escalator Fiction Competition, as chosen by our judges and mentors. Erin will now enjoy a year’s worth of development from professional writers.
Erin Soros
My work travels between creative writing, academic research and community advocacy. I grew up in Vancouver, where I was a rape crisis counsellor and a coordinator of literacy programs for marginalized youth. Collaborative projects with First Nations elders prompted an interest in my own oral history, and I began recording the life stories of retired loggers up and down the BC coast. This history inspired a turn toward fiction: I moved to New York to complete an MFA in Writing at Columbia University, where I designed and taught courses that explored philosophy in relation to social justice. I am now pursuing a PhD at the UEA, teaching human rights, psychoanalysis, and literature while analyzing the testimony of collective and individual trauma.
My fiction and non-fiction have been published in international journals and anthologies, most recently in West Coast Line, in a special issue devoted to Canadian fiction. Stories have also been aired on the CBC and BBC—as a finalist for the BBC Short Story Award and as winner of the CBC Literary Award and the Commonwealth Prize for the Short Story. My novel-in-progress, Hook Tender, is set in an immigrant logging camp during the Second World War. A collection of prose and photographs, Morning is Vertical, is forthcoming in 2012 from Rufus Books.