Lisa Moore: Degrees of Nakedness

Twice nominated for the Giller Prize, Lisa Moore has been described as a writer with a "feel for place as gritty as dirt under your fingernails".

A resident of St John's, Newfoundland, her city and island are vividly rendered in her short fiction and novels. Moore's first collection, 'Degrees of Nakedness', introduced readers to her tough, naturalistic prose, her sensuously wrought land and cityscapes, and characters straddling the extremes of raw emotion and the trivialities of modern existence.

In 'Alligator', her first novel, multiple plot-lines weave together a group of characters loving and labouring in variously exploitative, heartless and violent relationships, brilliantly mirroring the reptilian indifference of the title character.

By contrast, Moore's recent novel, 'February', evokes, with profound sympathy, the lives of working people in the aftermath of a shipping tragedy. "She brings to her pages," wrote Richard Ford, "what we are always seeking in fiction and only find in the best of it... an unswerving instinct for what's important in life."

Moore will be in conversation with Caroline Baum.

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