Dianne Warren

Dianne Warren builds fiction from Saskatchewan communities, understated conversation, and the private pressures within ordinary routines. Juliet in August was published in Canada as Cool Water and received the 2010 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction. The novel gathers several intersecting lives in a prairie town over a brief summer period, moving among ranchers, families, neighbours, and people facing difficult choices about land or companionship. Its structure extends Warren's experience with shorter forms by allowing separate character studies to accumulate into a communal portrait. Before the novel, she published the story collections The Wednesday Flower Man, Bad Luck Dog, and A Reckless Moon, and wrote plays produced in Saskatchewan. The United States edition appeared through Amy Einhorn Books and later Berkley. Warren is also a short-story writer and playwright, and her regional focus gives landscape and economic uncertainty an active place in how characters understand one another.