Maillard, Keith, 1942-....

Keith Maillard was born in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1942. From 1968 to 1970 he wrote and produced a weekly public affairs radio show called The Underground News for Boston University Radio. During the same period he was also a writer and editor for the underground newspapers The Free Press of Boston and Broadside. He emigrated to Canada in 1970 and after a brief period in Alert Bay, he settled in Vancouver. In the 1970s, Maillard was a freelance broadcaster for the CBC, songwriter, arranger and bass player for the Ferron Band (the backing band for Vancouver folksinger Ferron), and he continued to write fiction. His published novels now include Two Strand River (1976), Alex Driving South (1980), The Knife in My Hands (1981), Cutting Through (1983), Motet (1989), and Light in the Company of Women (1993). He has also written two feature film screenplays: an adaptation of the novel Two Strand River, and Tiffany; both have been optioned and are in development for production. Maillard began teaching part-time in the Creative Writing Department at UBC in 1980. In 1989 he became an Assistant Professor, teaching long fiction, short fiction, screen writing, and radio drama and features. His special area of interest is the developing literary genre of magic realism.