A Trilogy of Factoids on Guy Gavriel Kay
On par with J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula Le Guin, the legendary, Saskatchewan-born master of fantasy fiction made his debut in 1984 with the first book in his modern classic trilogy, the beloved Fionavar Tapestry. Guy Gavriel Kay’s new, highly anticipated novel comes out more than three decades after his first (with 11 books in between). Children of Earth and Sky is only the latest reason to geek out over G.G.K. Here are three more.
By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.
—Guy Gavriel Kay
- You Tolkien to Me? It was the shoulder-tap every mythopoeic-lit fan dreamed of: In 1974, Guy Gavriel Kay was sought out, through a Canadian connection to Christopher Tolkien’s wife, to help edit The Silmarillion. J.R.R. Tolkien had died the year before and the book was to be published posthumously. Tolkien’s youngest son Christopher, his literary executor, invited Kay, a student at the University of Manitoba at the time, to join him in Oxford and assist. Christopher Tolkien has since said that, “almost every substantial change made to my father’s manuscript went through Guy Kay.”
- Patience, Grasshopper Rather than rest on his laurels following the famous editing gig, Kay went to law school and, later, worked as a writer and producer at CBC. Fiction ultimately won him over completely. In a recent interview in The Guardian, the author said that his “quietly exhilarating” time spent with Tolkien’s manuscripts gave him a major clue about great writing. “I was looking at drafts of The Lord of the Rings and rough starts for The Silmarillion and came to realise they don’t spring full-blown, utterly, completely formed in brilliance. They get there with writing and rewriting and drudgery and mistakes, and eventually if you put in the hours and the patience, something good might happen.”
- Genre Bender After making his name with a classic fantasy trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry (the first volume was pounded out on a typewriter purchased at a flea market in Athens when the writer was wintering in Crete) Kay has resisted pigeonholing. His classic Tigana, published in 1990, draws more from the historical than the mythical; it was so different from what they expected, that his Fionavar publishers turned it down when his enthused agent submitted it partway. Unfazed, the agent and author later sold the rights on auction for a substantial sum, worldwide. That novel, like all his others, became a global bestseller. In 2014, Kay was named to the Order of Canada.
