Award-winning author comes to Fanshawe

Header image for Interrobang article CREDIT: HEIDI PYPER
Award-winning author Andrew Pyper will be at Fanshawe on October 23 to read from his latest The Demonologist.

When Andrew Pyper graduated from the University of Toronto’s law school, he moved to Peterborough, a small town about 130 km northeast of Toronto.

He rented a cheap place with the money he’d saved publishing law articles and working on Bay Street and began writing his first novel, Lost Girls, a supernatural thriller about a young criminal defence lawyer that is given his first murder case.

By the time Pyper finished the book seven or eight months later, the money was gone. He went around town, handing out his résumé to bar owners. He had no interest in practicing law. He wanted to be a bartender, something he’d done to support himself in his 20’s, and write short stories on the side.

Fifteen years and six novels later, the award-winning author from Stratford has yet to set foot in a courtroom. He never ended up serving beer after his law degree either. Instead, he makes a living writing novels and doing book tours. He will be at Fanshawe College on October 23, reading from his new novel, The Demonologist.

Pyper started coming up with stories as soon as he learned how to write.

“I remember Grade 1 and Grade 2, learning handwriting on the chalkboard and doing it at home,” he said. “I became obsessed with it. I would be writing stories in the air, pretending my finger was a pen … It drove my mom crazy, and so she went after me with her imaginary eraser and was just rubbing it all out.”

Since his siblings were all much older than him, he had no one to play with. So, he made up stories and told them into his tape recorder.

“I just loved doing it.”

Pyper went on to study English literature at McGill University, graduating with a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree.

It was while in his undergrad that he published his first shorty, Call Roxane. The story was about a young man feeling estranged from the world being driven by his father to a mental clinic.

He continued publishing short stories during his studies, including a short story collection, Kiss Me, but he never thought of writing as something he could make a living of.

His father was an ophthalmologist and his mother was a homemaker but trained as a nurse. His siblings worked in the sciences.

“I didn’t come from a family of artists or writers or actors or anything like that,” he said. “So I didn’t have around me examples of people who made their living in the arts, and, subsequently, I assumed that you couldn’t.”

After his master’s degree, Pyper had to figure out what he wanted to do professionally. He ended up in law school.

“Law was absolutely a default choice,” he said. “[I] pretty much knew right away that I didn’t want to be a lawyer, but I stuck it out, got a law degree and then rewarded myself by going away and writing what turned out to be my first novel.”

Pyper wasn’t expecting much of Lost Girls.

“I thought it was a strange kind of a hybrid – a court room thriller ghost story,” he said. “There’s not many of them out there.”

Except, the book became a success. It was picked up by publishers in Canada soon after it was sent out. It was picked up by publishers in the United States and in the United Kingdom the following week. By the end of the month, Universal Pctures had bought the movie rights.

That’s when Pyper decided to pursue his dream of being an author.

“I didn’t know how long it was going to last, but it was this insane invitation to be a part of something I never thought I’d be lucky enough to be apart of.”

His latest book, The Demonologist, topped The Globe and Mail’s bestseller list and was the winner of the International Thriller Writers Award for best hardcover novel.

“I’m really interested in meeting him and hearing his reading,” said Roy Geiger, a professor in the School of Language & Liberal Studies at Fanshawe.

“One thing I like about Andrew’s work is that he writes about exotic places, like Venice, but he also writes about local places, places we might know, like Exeter, or Toronto, or the drive north on Highway 69, and he makes them equally strange and exotic. He comes from this area of the country and he uses what he knows. He’s unapologetically Canadian in his choice of material and setting, and he’s internationally recognized.”