17 March – Christchurch
18/21 March – Wellington
ANNIE PROULX
BIRD CLOUD: a memoir
‘Bird Cloud’ is the name she gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and 400-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, ravens, scores of bluebirds, kestrels, elk and a dozen antelope. She knew she had to purchase the land, and she knew what she would build on it – a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character – a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen.
Proulx's first non-fiction book in more than twenty years, Bird Cloud is the story of building that house and an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region, inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho and Shoshone Indians. It is also an illuminating autobiography and family history, going back to nineteenth century Mississippi river boat captains and Canadian settlers. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness – a house with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps – and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time.
Although she didn't start her career as a writer until she was in her 50s, in 1993 E. Annie Proulx became the first woman to win the prestigious PEN/Faulkner book award, for her debut novel Postcards.
The following year she won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her novel The Shipping News. She is also the author of Accordion Crimes (1996) and That Old Ace in the Hole (2002).
Her short story ‘Brokeback Mountain’ appeared in the collection Close Range (1999) and was adapted as a movie starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal (2005). Her other story collections include Heart Songs (1988); Bad Dirt (2004) and Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories (2008). She lives in Wyoming.
Bird Cloud – a memoir by Annie Proulx
Imprint: 4th Estate
Publication date: February 2011
RRP: $34.99
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