Category Archives: Essays

On Tuesday May 11th, 2022 GGK delivered the eighth annual Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford, broadcasting live from Toronto in Canada. For more information and responses to the lecture, see the tolkienlecture.org website.  

As the 2021 spring guest editor for LoveReading, GGK shares recommendations for five books. His poem “Mostly Quiet” is also showcased. Follow the link below to read it. https://www.lovereading.co.uk/lovereading-loves/guest-editor-spring-2021-guy-gavriel-kay-29.html

This first appeared at www.lithub.com in 2019. I am, more or less, allergic to writing advice. This is a problem these days, because writing advice is floating in the air like pollen in springtime, I await the Top Ten List … Continue reading →

Friendship interests me as a writer. It can be a mysterious thing. Usually it grows over time, someone becomes a presence in our life and at some point we realize how much we value them – and often that comes … Continue reading →

Guy Gavriel Kay described the process of picking his six favourite books as a thoroughly regrettable, “evil, sadistic exercise.” This first appeared at www.cbc.ca in 2016.   The historical fiction that first hooked him Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff … Continue reading →

This  first appeared at https://thewalrus.ca in 2016.  I wrote my first, never-published book in a fishing village on the south coast of Crete at the end of the 1970s. I went back, two winters later, to write most of The Summer … Continue reading →

This first appeared at http://boingboing.net/ in 2016.  The origin story of Children of Earth and Sky, my current novel, begins with my Croatian editor being the first person ever to tell me about the Uskoks of Senj. He did that … Continue reading →

Public performances are another aspect of the writer’s business about which I feel some ambivalence. There are ironies here: I enjoy reading aloud, and I derive a great deal of pleasure from meeting readers. What’s the problem, then? Well, I’ve … Continue reading →

This afterword first appeared in the ROC USA 10th anniversary edition of Tigana, published in 1999. It is reprinted here with kind permission of the publishers.     Tigana is in good part a novel about memory: the necessity of … Continue reading →

Toastmaster Address, World Fantasy Awards 2007 This was the toastmaster address GGK delivered at the World Fantasy Awards banquet in Saratoga Springs, at WFC 2007. It lacks the ad libs and the laugh track, but does have an addendum with … Continue reading →

This was first printed in the Globe & Mail, May 2008. Reproduced with kind permission. Incidentally, the title was their choice!       Edmond Burke said, “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do … Continue reading →

Mondegreens This piece first appeared in the National Post. It is reprinted here with kind permission. Sometimes life delivers something we always longed for but didn’t even know it. It doesn’t happen (as best I can tell) nearly often enough, … Continue reading →

This was written in the summer of 1999 as part of the Chapters book chain’s ‘Great Writers’ series of essays that ran as full page inserts in Canadian newspapers.     ‘Mythology is what never was, but always is.’ It … Continue reading →

Bright Weavings – GGK’s Words: Essay “The Problem with the Patriot” The Problem with ‘The Patriot‘ I was in London when the latest summer blockbuster, Roland Emmerich’s ‘The Patriot’ opened in theatres there. It was assaulted by some of the … Continue reading →

What follows was delivered on November 4, 2000 at the one-day ‘Reflections on an Ethical Society’ conference at University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall. (Ironically, the setting for the opening scene of The Summer Tree .) This is a somewhat edited … Continue reading →

This was first printed in the Globe & Mail, March 6, 2009. A few recent online incidents regarding authors and readers on the Web are just too revealing to pass up a chance to consider them. By way of a … Continue reading →

A while ago, a reader posted online that she’d finished her fourteenth read of one of my earlier novels. I offered a thank you and queried, idly, if that was the record. Evidently not. People began outlining their reread statistics, … Continue reading →

This was first printed in the Globe & Mail, October 16, 2009. This time of year, in France and Italy, hunters renew their licences and start cleaning rifles, not always carefully enough, preparing to go forth to destroy the peace … Continue reading →

This appreciation first appeared in Locus Magazine, December 2001. I met Dorothy Dunnett first in the spring of 1975, a memory I cherish and a moment that was to teach me something about writers and how they might deal graciously … Continue reading →

This piece was written for Earthlight, GGK’s British publishing house.         At the end of every novel I write, a journey begins with no known destination. I never know what my next book will be. In order … Continue reading →

Exile Sometimes a reader’s question stops you cold. Makes you cast an eye back over your own body of work and think about it differently. This can happen with an academic paper or a thoughtful review, but it feels more … Continue reading →

This afterword first appeared in the HarperPerennial Canada 20th anniversary edition of The Tapestry, published in 2004. It is reprinted here with kind permission of the publishers.     On the occasion of an anniversary edition, there are many things … Continue reading →

‘Home and Away’ is an amended form of a speech I first delivered as the keynote speech for an academic conference in Toronto, and then (with examples updated and varied) at a convention in Zagreb, Croatia. I cut the speechmaker’s … Continue reading →

This was first printed in the Globe & Mail, January 2009. It was recently reported that over fifty million Russians had decided the greatest Russian ever. In a broadcast on the state-run Rossiya channel, which concluded three months of telephone … Continue reading →