"Before The Flood was born at UBC and exists only because of their wise three-genre requirement. I went there purely for poetry, wrote a few sci-fi trifles for their fiction requirement; then, since I wanted nothing to do with drama, scratched my head for days over the "creative non-fiction" genre. Finally, given that I went to high school in this weird little New Brunswick town just prior to its semi-destruction with the construction of a hydroelectric dam, I decided to try my hand at an adolescent autobiographyical memoir sort of thing, hoping it would be entertaing enough to get me through the course. Well, it went over well in the workshop (and went on to become one of the chapters in Before The Flood), so I tried another one, which also went over well. And before you could say "thesis", I grabbed Keith Maillard as my mentor/advisor who informed me that the sooner I faced the fact I was writing a novel, the better. At this very moment, somewhere in the Creative Writing Department library at UBC, is a thesis with the dumb title of Gods In The River, which is actually the first draft of Before The Flood." -- Alan R. Wilson

PLACE OF BIRTH: Moncton, New Brunswick

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Victoria, British Columbia

LITERARY AWARDS RECEIVED:
2000 Books in Canada/Chapters First Novel Award for Before the Flood

LITERARY AWARD NOMINATIONS:
Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction for Before the Flood
Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour for Before the Flood

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Before the Flood, novel, Cormorant, 1999
Counting to 100, poetry, Wolsak & Wynn, 1996
Animate Objects, poetry, Turnstone, 1995

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS:
Alan R. Wilson has an undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of New Brunswick, and a graduate degree in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. He has had several jobs, the most memorable as a fire hydrant painter, an experience immortalized in the CBC television drama "106 Fire Hydrants". For reasons best known to himself, he once wrote a set of 100 poems about the numbers from 1 to 100 that became his second book, Counting to 100. He is currently working on Lucifer's Hair, the second in a quartet of novels that began with Before the Flood, and which will all be set in the same Maritime town.