Famished Lover

For Alan Cumyn, the desire for expression through the written word began early. Born in Ottawa in 1960, he started writing poetry and short stories in high school. After university he spent a year in China as an English as a Second Language teacher. That year abroad sparked a career in international development and human rights. It served as the inspiration for both Cumyn's first novel, Waiting for Li Ming, published by Goose Lane Editions in 1993, and for his popular guide to work and study abroad, What in the World is Going On?, first published in 1988. The Famished Lover's Ramsay Crome lives with the emotional fallout from his incarceration in a First World War POW camp, an experience shared by Cumyn's real-life great uncle and which served as inspiration for this book. And yet, as much as this work explores this trauma, Cumyn says it is foremost a story of love. "What does "love" mean when you're starving in a POW camp or trying to make a living as an artist in Montreal in the Great Depression? In what unusual ways do hearts respond in the most trying of times?" Alan Cumyn has lived all over Canada as well as abroad in China and Indonesia. Today he makes his home in Ottawa with his wife and two daughters. He is Writer in Residence at the University of Ottawa this fall (2006) and chair of the Writers in Prison committee of PEN Canada. He is the author of six critically acclaimed novels, including Burridge Unbound, a finalist for the Giller Prize, and The Sojourn, the novel in which Ramsay Crome first appears. He is working on screenplays for both Burridge Unbound and his comic novel Losing It.Alan Cumyn is the author of 'Famished Lover', published 2006 under ISBN 9780864924483 and ISBN 0864924488.