Concordia graduates and writers Sarah Faber and Oisín Curran win Atlantic Book Awards

While at the university, Curran attended a poetry translation course given by Antonio D’Alfonso, BA 75. Part of the class work involved translating poems by 17 Quebec poets, and D’Alfonso used the assignment to publish an anthology called Found in Translation, where each poem is translated by five different students, including Curran.

“I always wanted to be a writer and at Concordia I gravitated toward literary translation — it’s something I haven’t pursued, but would be happy to revisit,” Curran says. “I started writing when I was in third grade — I just felt I had to.”

Early start

Like her husband, Faber knew from an early age that she wanted to be a writer. “I started writing as kid,” she says.

“I always had a certain voice — a narrator inside my head — words arranging themselves in a particular order. It was either write it down or be driven mad by it.”

Faber credits her time at Concordia with giving her a thicker skin. “Workshops helped me to think more critically about my own writing, and to be less self-indulgent. They also helped make me less sensitive to criticism,” Faber says.

“There are people in workshops who will flat out tell you they hate your writing, and that can actually be a very useful thing,” she adds. “It makes rejection easier to take, and you learn that you don’t really need everyone to like what you do. You just need to be clear in your own mind about your particular aesthetic and preferences and try to execute those as skilfully as possible.”

Faber’s first novel, All Is Beauty Now, is set in Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s. It follows a family grappling with their eldest daughter’s disappearance as well as the father’s bipolar disorder. It’s based on stories from her mother’s childhood in Brazil, though Faber says she fictionalized a lot of it.

“Both my grandfather and mother had bipolar disorder, so I also wanted to better understand that experience by researching it and writing about it,” she says.

“In a sense, writing the novel was a way of working through my own nostalgia about a place and time I hadn’t actually experienced, and also confront the realities and the darker aspects of both the country and a life I had romanticized.”

Curran’s novel, Mopus (Counterpath Press), was published in 2008. His second effort, Blood Fable, made it to the Globe and Mail’s most anticipated new books of 2017 list.

It tells the tale of an 11-year-old boy and his parents, who live in a back-to-the-land Buddhist community that’s unravelling in rural Maine, in 1980. The boy’s mother has just discovered she has cancer. To cope, he tells his parents an epic story about his life before birth, as he remembers it.

While the pair didn’t plan on releasing their recent books the same year or competing against each other — it could happen again.

They are both currently working on their next projects — Faber’s is a novel with a detective element that explores the tensions and darker undercurrents within a family, while Curran’s book will look at the murder of the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe.