Randy Boyagoda

Writer, critic and scholar Randy Boyagoda is the author of three novels, a SSHRC-supported critical biography, and a scholarly monograph. His fiction has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2006) and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize (2012), and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection (2012). He contributes essays, reviews, and opinions to publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Commonweal, Harper’s, Financial Times (UK), Guardian, New Statesman, Globe and Mail, and National Post, in addition to appearing frequently on CBC Radio. He served as President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017. His third novel, Original Prin, was published in 2018. Professor Boyagoda teaches the Gilson Seminar in Faith and Ideas at the University of St. Michael’s College.

  • Areas of Interest

    American Literature, Culture and Politics

    The Catholic Intellectual Tradition

    Contemporary Literature

  • Publications

    “When Literary Politics Mattered to Geopolitics.” American Literary History 28.3 (2016): 634-643.

    Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square New York: Random House, 2015. 480 pp.

    “Sister Saint Maisie Connecticut.” Image 86 (2015): 7-16.

    “Reading Faulkner in and Beyond Postcolonial Studies: ‘There is no where for us to go but east,’” The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner. John T. Matthews, Editor. New York and London: Cambridge University Press (2015): 204-219.

    Beggar’s Feast: A Novel. Toronto:Penguin, 2011; Colombo, Sri Lanka: Perera-Hussein, 2011; New Delhi, IN: Harper Collins, India, 2012; New York: Penguin USA, 2012; London, UK: Penguin,UK, 2014. 336 pp.

    “Preface to the Twentieth-Anniversary Edition” of Doing Well and Doing Good: The Challenge to the Christian Capitalist, by Richard John Neuhaus. New York: Random House (2012): xi-xiv.

    “There Are No Coconut Trees in Toronto,” in Reality Imagined: Stories of Identity and Change. Candice Fung, Janet E. McIntosh,Ken Whytock, Editors. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson (2011): 24-32.

    “A Deus Ex Machina in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Displaced Person.’” The Southern Literary Journal 43.1 (2010): 59-74.

    Race, Immigration and American Identity in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner. New York: Routledge, 2008. 143 pp.

    “Digital Conversion Experiences in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis” Studies in American Culture 30.1 

    Governor of the Northern Province: A Novel. Toronto: Penguin, 2006. 231 pp.

    “From St. Augustine to Salman Rushdie: Time and Narrative in Postcolonial and Pluralist Literatures.” Postcolonial Text 1.1 (2004): online journal.

    “Just Where and What is ‘the (comparatively speaking) South’? Caribbean Writers on Melville and Faulkner. Mississippi Quarterly 57.1 (2003): 65-74.

    “Three Kings of Disorient: A Globalized Search for Home in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet.” South Asian Review.