Touch the Dragon by Karen Connelly
New material including photos, maps and an afterword by Karen Connelly is included in this new format edition of her 1993 Governor General's Award-winning classic, Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal. At the age of 17, the adventure-seeking Calgary teenager went to Thailand on a Rotary exchange program and her life changed forever. Twenty-four years later, Connelly is still travelling and writing, inspiring the world with her stories.Through vivid imagery, humour and careful observation of the families, school friends and Buddhist rituals around her, Connelly brings to life the small village in northern Thailand where she stayed for a year.Initially homesick and frustrated by the habits and lifestyle of the gentle but patriarchal Thais, Connelly begins to view herself as one of them by the end of her stay. The idea of returning to Canada becomes terrifying and strange because she has become so accustomed to her new community and the Thai way of life. Put together from her journals written at the time, Connelly's to-the-moment chronicling of her experience reveals a momentous growing experience in the heart and mind of a young woman.
Karen Connelly's first book of poetry, The Small Words in My Body, won the Pat Lowther Award. Her first book of prose, Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal - an account of the year she spent in Thailand at seventeen - won the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction in 1993; at twenty-four, she was the youngest writer ever to win that prize. The Lizard Cage, Connelly's first novel, was shortlisted for both the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. To write it, she found she had to lock herself in the cage along with the main character. For nine long years she imagined she was trapped in a windowless, 8 x 10 jail cell. I cried every day for the first four years that I worked on that book, Connelly said in an interview with Reader's Digest. There were times when I thought I would never be free of it. She went on to explain what helped to urge her forward, I came to realize that I was making my contribution to the largely unwritten history of kindness. At least that's one of my motives-to contribute to the literature of how people retain and nurture their humanity, particularly in difficult situations. Karen Connelly is currently working on a book of essays set in the refugee camps and among the rebel armies along the Burmese-Thai border. She makes her home in Toronto.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780888013767 |
| ISBN 10 | 0888013760 |
| Title | Touch the Dragon |
| Author | Karen Connelly |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Turnstone Press |
| Year published | 2010-07-30 |
| Number of pages | 200 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |