Richard Rathwell

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Richard Rathwell (1944-) is a Canadian novelist and poet.

Rathwell was born in Ottawa in 1944. He attended High School in Oakville, Ontario where he won awards for public speaking, where his usual theme was political and literary utopias. His teachers found him oppositional.

Rathwell attended Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, a suburb of Vancouver, for his honours degree where he was twice arrested protesting the nature of the university. Among his teachers were Robin Blaser and Jerry Zaslove. At the University of Victoria his graduate supervisor was Constance Rooke.

In Vancouver, Rathwell was associated with the journal ‘Rage’ and ‘The Partisan’. He was chairman of the Partisan Organisation. Later he was provincial secretary of a national communist organisation and for a brief time its national secretary. During this period he was arrested in Toronto twice and arrested and beaten in custody in Montreal. He was named in parliament by the Canadian Solicitor General Jean-Pierre Goyer as a dangerous person in relation to the Gastown Riots of 1971. He was the first Canadian to visit Albania under the Enver Hoxha regime (and the first as well after it fell). Much later he was on the last plane out of Belgrade before the war. He inspected the prison camps after they were opened in Albania.

Following Canada, Richard lived in Ireland and was part of the Blue Apple rural writing collective. He won national awards in Ireland for short story writing and poetry. During this time he also won an award for a restoration project of a Georgian staircase from the EU. He worked as a journalist for the Kilkenny Phoenix and as a castle warden. He soon left Ireland for Nigeria.

Rathwell has taught literature in schools in Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Lesotho as well as in Ireland. He was a tutor at Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria. He has won awards for children’s drama productions and writing in Nigeria and Zimbabwe. He was later invited to advise the World Bank. He has been an expert consultant for the World Health Organization, the European Union, and the UN Commission on Trade and Development. He has also worked as an expert adviser to the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Rathwell’s career before he became a writer was, for an extended period of time, as a country director or executive for Aid organisations. This service took place initially in Nigeria, Lesotho and Egypt. He was the global operational manager for international social development and medical aid organisations, one based in Vienna and one in the United Kingdom. He headed a branch of a humanitarian and rehabilitation organisation in Albania. During all this time he assisted primarily the building of schools and hospitals and the provision of water. Secondarily there was policy and design work. There is a street in Gulu, Uganda which may still bear his name, and a tree in India. Rathwell used funds to restore a museum of mediaeval Icons and a theatre as well as for other arguably non-aid activities. During a period of absolute monarchy in Lesotho Rathwell was director of King Moshoeshoe II's social organisation.

Richard’s aid work is the basis of two of his novels. His experiences as an ‘exile’ serve as the basis of some of his other works. He presently resides in London, UK.

WORKS

Rathwell has written four novels: The Bush: Hank the Aid Detective, based on his experience as an aid worker in Nigeria, The Borderline: Casebook Translations, a novel about exile and the breakdown of groups and the personality, Red the Nile, Blue the Hills, a novel centred on his work in Egypt, and Death's Doors: Original Families, Proper Privacies, and Mental States, which takes place in Albania and Canada and has been compared to the work of the Albanian author Ismail Kadare.

He has also written shorter books called chapbooks of discursive prose and poetry. These are: Yuuf: KJ's People, Fighting Terror in London, The Beak's Poems, Hope and Charity, and Dono About Writing in the first collection; and One Poem Forward, Two Poems Back, and November: Seance for the Dead Arts in the second. These were published under the Blue Orange Publishing imprint.

And a much valued contributor to RiverSpine and Psychic Rotunda.