In 1995, he released The Lions of Al-Rassan, which describes a multiracial society akin to Moorish Spain. In 1990 he brought out Tigana, which takes place in an imagined world much like Renaissance Italy, and, in 1992, A Song for Arbonne, set in a fictional medieval Provence. A few years ago his agent joked that the continuing sales of the Fionavar books would help Kay and his wife, Laura, put their sons, Sam and Matthew, through college.Īn ambitious man, he eventually pushed past the frontiers of fantasy into a new sub-genre, speculative historical fiction. The book was the first volume of Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry series and won an international cult following. It opens in Convocation Hall on U of T’s campus and introduces a Joseph Campbellish figure who turns out to be a mage (or benign sorcerer). That conference inspired the opening chapter of Kay’s first book, The Summer Tree. Here, he encountered the scholar/guru who had awakened a generation of North Americans to the power of myth, Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Looking for more intellectual diversion, he cut a week of school to attend a major conference on Celtic studies at U of T. He did well (in fact he came second in his first-year law class), even though he could often be found at the pinball machine in the law-school basement. “I hung around the Hart House library and read The New Yorker to remind myself that I really was a writer.” “I arrived from rural England, and there I was at school in downtown Toronto, and I just hated it,” says Kay.
At first he found the place decidedly uninspiring. Kay entered the Faculty of Law at U of T in 1975 and graduated in 1978. Tolkien, on the senior Tolkien’s last major manuscript.īut, again like his father, Kay was a pragmatist, so he returned to Canada to find a profession – knowing that making a living as a novelist would be a long shot. After graduating in philosophy from the University of Manitoba, he went to Oxford to work with Christopher Tolkien, son of the Anglo-Saxon scholar and celebrated fantasy writer, J.R.R. Like his father, a Winnipeg surgeon, Guy Gavriel Kay always had a passion for writing.
He gives readings in the Hart House library, which he says is one of his favourite places on the planet. Like Roe, Kay has retained his connections with U of T. The university’s community of medievalists gave Caroline Roe the idea for her Isaac of Girona crime series, and it’s not a great leap from Girona in 14th-century Spain to the fictionalized medieval Spain of Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Lions of Al-Rassan. The University of Toronto’s midtown campus is solidly 19th and 20th century, yet its neo-Gothic and red-brick structures have somehow provided the impetus for amazing flights of fancy about medieval fictional worlds.
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