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University of New Brunswick writer-in-residence Colleen Murphy will read from her body of work including Pig Girl, I Hope My Heart Burns First, The Breathing Hole, Beating Heart Cadaver, and The December Man on Thursday, March 29 at 7 p.m. in the Ganong Hall Lecture Theatre at UNB’s Saint John campus.

Ms. Murphy is a playwright, filmmaker and librettist. She won the 2014 Carol Bolt Award and the 2016 Governor General’s Literary Award for English Drama for her play Pig Girl. Her play, The December Man, won the 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama, the 2008 Carol Bolt Award and the 2006 Enbridge Playwrights Award. She was also shortlisted for the 2014 Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, valued at $100,000. She won two awards in the CBC Literary Competition for the radio dramas Fire-Engine Red and Pumpkin Eaters. She is also an award-winning filmmaker and her distinct films have played in festivals around the world.

About Colleen Murphy’s body of work

Pig Girl
For 85 minutes, a killer holds a dying woman captive in a secluded barn. In the empty space to either side are the dying woman’s sister and a police officer. Their action spans nine years as the sister beats her head against a police force agonizingly slow to investigate the disappearance of marginalized sex workers. Pig Girl won the 2016 Governor General's Literary Award for English Drama.

I Hope My Heart Burns First
A group of disaffected and inept young adults break into a mansion to steal enough to pay for their own particular wants. Things don’t go as planned, as the owners’ daughters return to the house. A pizza delivery man trapped in the chaos provides a humorous release from the escalating tension, but a sense of inevitable catastrophe mounts as the house is trashed.

The Breathing Hole
In 1534, an Inuit widow – somewhat to the alarm of her community – adopts an orphaned polar bear cub. Over the next 500 years, the bear encounters explorer Sir John Franklin and his doomed crew, and the passengers and crew of an Arctic cruise ship, who finally – and fatally – fulfil the mysterious vision that came to Huumittuq half a millennium earlier.

Beating Heart Cadaver
Leona and Danny’s young daughter, Amelia, perishes in a car crash. Paralyzed in a car accident, Danny is spurned by his wife’s harsh accusations as she clings helplessly to a balloon believed to contain the daughter’s last breath. Turbulent and daring, Murphy’s writing ventures through dark emotional territory unearthing humour and forgiveness as Leona and Danny right their way back to each other, and to life.

The December Man
A public tragedy shatters a working-class family in Montréal. Struggling to survive the aftermath, Benoît and Kathleen do everything they can to help their beloved son cope with guilt and rage. Using humour and the humdrum of everyday life, the play intuitively moves backwards in time to the fateful day when Jean, the only ray of hope in this working-class family, escaped the massacre...or thought he did. This searing drama on courage, heroism and despair explores the long private shadows that public violence casts.

Beating Heart Cadaver (1999)
Leona and Danny's young daughter, Amelia, perishes in a car crash. Paralyzed in a car accident, Danny is spurned by his wife's harsh accusations as she clings helplessly to a balloon believed to contain the daughter's last breath. Murphy's writing ventures through dark emotional territory unearthing humour and forgiveness as Leona and Danny right their way back to each other, and to life.

The Lorenzo Reading Series is supported by the League of Canadian Poets, UNB Saint John, the UNB Saint John Bookstore, Canada Council for the Arts and its private reading sponsors.

Media contact: Andrea Kikuchi