Thomas king author biography

He is a vocal political activist for aboriginal rights in both countries. InKing sought the New Democratic Party nomination for Guelph and came in fourth in the Canadian federal election of King began writing it in during a one-month writer's residency at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. The novel was published in and received positive critical reception.

Postcolonial," King challenges the view that all Native literature is a reaction to colonialism, rather than an extension of longer Native tradition.

Thomas king author biography: Thomas King, CC, novelist, short-story

Again mixing humor, traditional Native mythology and contemporary issues, King creates a collection of memorable stories. Maintaining the same theme and style of his previous works and enhancing them, King combines the lives of a number of Native characters making their way back to their Reserve with a continual retelling of the Creation myth.

Truth and Bright Water was published in and focuses more on the oral tradition of the Natives in its form and style. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects.

Thomas king author biography: Thomas King is a novelist,

Wikidata item. Canadian writer and broadcast presenter born Thomas King CC. Early life and education [ edit ]. Teaching [ edit ]. Activism [ edit ]. Writings [ edit ]. Politics [ edit ]. Other work [ edit ].

Thomas king author biography: Thomas King CC is an

Personal life [ edit ]. Works [ edit ]. Books [ edit ]. Selected short stories [ edit ]. Scripts [ edit ]. Awards and recognition [ edit ]. Literary awards [ edit ]. Honors [ edit ]. Other [ edit ]. Electoral record [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. However, his writing does not simply separate native elements from a corrupt white influence or mythologize native life, strategies that tend to create dehumanizing stereotypes of indigenous peoples as members of a "vanishing race" or as "noble savages.

King himself is of Greek and Cherokee descent, and he appears to understand ethnicity as an inherently unstable set of self-created fictions, to be treated ironically rather than merely accepted. His writing is playfully satiric; with broad humor he debunks both white and native misconceptions of native life. King's native person plays a dual role, at once participant and critic, a member of mainstream society and social misfit.

His satire hinges on this duality, with its troubling, comic contradictions.

Thomas king author biography: Thomas King CC (born April 24,

In Green Grass, Running Watermore than his other novels, King engages with the myth of Canada as an empty wilderness, and the subsequent myths of the "Indians" the term King uses so he can "talk about Native people in general" in a "Cowboy and Indian"-dominated Western landscape. One of the pivotal moments in the novel is when the ending of a popular Western film is revised so that the Indians win and kill John Wayne.

The novel highlights the fact that First Nations people have often been constructed in Hollywood movies and Western books as artifacts and commodities or have been romanticized. King's satire is perhaps sharpest in the novel in the depiction of Portland, a Native man who goes to Hollywood to become an actor in Westerns but who must don a fake nose because he does not look "Indian enough.

Before he can act in the movies he must go through an initiation into Hollywood culture by dancing in a strip show. He dances an almost pornographic dance with Pocahontas, during which a cowboy dancer comes on stage and defeats him, the Indian. In the end, however, Portland has a moment of triumph, after several moments of humiliation, when he is transformed into the Chief who leads the Indians into victory over the cowboys in the revised film.