Steven Hayward is a novelist and short story writer born in Toronto, Canada. The eldest of two brothers, he attended the University of Toronto and York University, and now teaches in the English Department at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Hayward’s most recent novel is the Canadian National Bestseller, Don’t Be Afraid. Set in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, it tells the story seventeen-year-old Jim Morrison–not the lead singer of the Doors who died a rock ‘n’ roll death in 1971, but a chubby seventeen-year-old living in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, who was born days after the singer’s death.
Jim, or Jimmy, as most people call him, has been living a largely invisible life, overshadowed by his older brother, Mike, popular and charismatic, and his father, Fort, a stern and unyielding engineer. But everything changes the night the public library explodes, with pieces of books and catalogue cards falling like snow from the dark sky.
A critical and commercial success, Don’t Be Afraid was a Globe and Mail Best Book for 2012 and was also named one of the top ten novels of the year by Toronto’s Now Magazine. “Don’t Be Afraid will break your heart in both sympathy and empathic celebration,” writes the novelist Robert Weirsema in the Globe and Mail. “It is both an elegy and an enthusiastic affirmation, darkness and light. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll wish more books were like this.”
His second novel,The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke won Italy’s prestigious Premio Grinzane Cavour Prize for best first novel. A historical novel set in 1933, when Toronto was a city rocked by fighting between Jews and the Swastika Club, the novel draws on the experiences of his grandparents to give a portrait of the hopeful and passionate lives of the ordinary men and women of a world gone by. About it the Toronto Star writes, “An absolute pleasure. . . . Hayward’s Ward has all the charm and colour of Richler’s St. Urbain Street…as powerful a rendering of the early 20th century immigrant experience in Toronto as is Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion.”
Hayward’s first book was Buddha Stevens and Other Stories which won the 2001 Upper Canada Writer’s Craft Award. Prior to the appearance of this collection, the individual stories that would eventually make up this collection were nominated for the Pushcart and Journey prizes, won awards at the University of Greensboro, the University of Arkansas, and the University of Toronto, and had appeared in The Iowa Review, Writ,Exile, The Southwestern Review, Fiddlehead, and Canadian Fiction Magazine.
The Globe and Mail listed Buddha Stevens and Other Stories as one of its top 100 Books of 2001 and praised it in these terms: “The genius of Toronto writer Steven Hayward. . .is to take the daily slipshod passage of trivial to traumatic events, present it as pure storytelling and distil from it the essence of what it means to live, through times both terrible and transcendent. . . . Hayward takes things we hope aren’t possible, things we hope won’t happen, and shows that their happening is precisely what it’s all about — and we’re as blessed as we are cursed by it. . . . It’s been years since I’ve seen this much fresh talent and wisdom.”
Hayward is an Assistant Professor in the English Department of Colorado College, in Colorado Springs. He teaches Creative Writing, Shakespeare, Canadian literature, and has published essays on a number of subjects including television and film, amendments to the tax code, Canadian literature and culture, and intercultural communication. A frequent contributor to The Globe and Mail, The Literary Review of Canada, and the Wall Street Journal, He has three children, Frances, Eddie, and Jimmy, and is married to Katherine, his muse and best critic. When he’s not writing or teaching, he’s usually riding his mountain bike somewhere, or playing squash.
His current projects include an adventure novel written for all ages called Frances Inscrutable and the Way the World Almost Ended, a novel set in Torino, Italy, and a libretto commissioned by the avant-garde composer Stephen Scott about the Petrograd Children’s Colony in Russia.