Kim Echlin is the author of Elephant Winter and Dagmar’s Daughter, The Disappeared, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, won the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction, and Under the Visible Life. 

This year Kim is back with her new novel Speak, Silence, which has already been longlisted for the Toronto Book Award. Set in 1999 and moving between Canada, Sarajevo, and a trial at the Hague it is an astounding, poetic novel about the fallout of the Bosnian war and loss, suffering and courage, and the strength of women through it all. “When I wrote Speak, Silence,” Kim says. “I asked to listen to the stories of the silenced. The international courts work toward the ideal of justice for everyone, but this idea remains difficult and fragile… What does this mean? How do we imagine it? The questions must be personal. Who are you? Who am I? Why would we hurt each other? What does it mean to fight a war on a woman’s body? What constitutes justice? What are we afraid of?”  In a starred review, Quill and Quire called it “powerful [. . .] an incredibly forceful book that insists readers sit up and pay attention”, and Slavenka Drakulić, journalist and author of They Would Never Hurt a Fly calls “this carefully researched and well-crafted novel… an impressive monument to the women.” 

Kim lives in Toronto.

Kim is supported by Author Patron Ryder-Burbidge Hurley Foster.

Website: www.hamishhamilton.ca
Book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/647053/speak-silence-by-kim-echlin/9780735240612

Appearing in:
10. The Voices of Ghosts
WS10. Writing the Quest: Inanna