Neil Smith describes how, when he first began writing, there was one thing he was sure of: he didn’t want to write auto-fiction. But his childhood was the kind that haunted him and eventually, he had to turn tragedy into art. 

Neil is a novelist, translator, and short story writer whose 2007 award-winning debut collection, Bang Crunch was re-released in July of this year and has been translated into several languages, most recently Russian. In 2015, he published his first novel, Boo, about a boy in the afterlife and the following year was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for his translation of Geneviève Pettersen’s novel La déesse des mouches à feu into The Goddess of Fireflies.

In this candid and highly personal conversation, Neil talks about his latest novel, Jones, the heartbreaking tale about a troubling childhood that he describes as 75% true.

Trigger warning: sexual abuse / suicide

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