Born in Calgary on December 3, 1969, Karen Connelly received the Pat Lowther Award for her first book of poetry, The Small Words in My Body, published by the Kalmalka New Writers Society in Vernon. She first came to B.C. in 1998 and has been writer-in-residence at the George Ryga Centre in Summerland. She has lived much of her life abroad, particularly in Greece. In the 1990s she began her involvement with the people of Burma and their plight under a repressive military regime. She has visited Burma and spent considerable time on the Thai-Burmese border, as reflected in her fourth poetry collection, The Border Surrounds Us, and her first novel, The Lizard Cage (Knopf, 2005), about a Buddhist protestor arrested by Burmese secret police and sentenced to 20 years in prison. The novel appeared when Connelly had moved to Toronto. It was followed by the candid travel memoir, Burmese Lessons: A Love Story.

Connelly has won the Pat Lowther Award, the Governor-General's Award and Britain's Orange Broadband New Novelist's Prize.

Connelly now lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Selected Publications:

The Small Words in My Body (Kalamalka Press, 1990; Gutter Press, rev. ed., 1995)
Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal (Turnstone Press, 1992)
This Brighter Prison: A Book of Journeys (Brick Books, 1993)
One Room in a Castle (Turnstone Press, 1995; HarperCollins Australia, 1996)
The Disorder of Love (Gutter Press, 1997)
The Border Surrounds Us (McClelland & Stewart, 2000)
The Lizard Cage (Knopf, 2005)
Burmese Lessons: A Love Story Knopf, 2009)
Come Cold River (Quattro Books, 2013)
The Change Room (Random House, 2017)

Awards:

Air Canada Award for Promising Young Writer, 1986.
The Pat Lowther Memorial Award for Small Words in My Body, 1990.
The Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction for Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal, 1993.

[BCBW 2017] "Poetry" "Politics"