Andrew Westoll
CBC Books | | Posted: January 10, 2019 1:28 PM | Last Updated: January 25, 2019
Andrew Westoll's The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary is on the Canada Reads 2019 longlist. The final five books and the panellists defending them will be revealed on Jan. 31, 2019.
The 2019 debates are happening on March 25-28, 2019 and will be hosted by Ali Hassan.
About Andrew Westoll
Andrew Westoll is a journalist and author of fiction and nonfiction in Toronto. His first book was The Riverbones, a travelogue about the jungles of Suriname, where he did research on capuchin monkeys. He followed this up with The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, a bestselling nonfiction book about a family of chimps liberated from a research facility and relocated at a sanctuary near Montreal. It won the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction, which is now known as the RBC Taylor Prize.
Westoll published his debut novel, The Jungle South of the Mountain, in 2016. The book follows a scientist named Stanley as he studies the life of capuchin monkeys in a South American rainforest. Westoll is also an assistant professor of creative writing at University of Toronto Scarborough.
- Andrew Westoll on studying monkeys in a South American jungle
- Why scientist-turned-writer Andrew Westoll is obsessed with primates
- Why Andrew Westoll felt compelled to tell the story of a troop of resilient chimps
Andrew Westoll on writing fiction vs. nonfiction
"When I first started writing, I was mostly writing fiction — mostly because I didn't know what creative nonfiction was — so I mostly spent my time writing really short stories and working on my sentences through fiction. I always kind of thought I'd be writing longer-form fiction at some point. And then nonfiction took me on a tour in a different direction.
I'm really interested in continuing to explore the fictional voice for sure.
I'm really interested in continuing to explore the fictional voice for sure.
I'm really interested in exploring the cross-genre voice... - Andrew Westoll
"I'm also really interested in exploring the cross-genre voice, which is something that I'm messing around with right now. I won't be just skipping straight back to nonfiction and forgetting about fiction — it's been really rewarding to stretch my legs and return to something that I thought I was originally going to be doing."