Stephen Henighan

Stephen Patrick Glanvill Henighan (born 19 June 1960) is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, journalist, translator and academic.

Henighan has written short stories and novels about immigrants and travellers, and has served as general editor of the Biblioasis International Translation Series.

As an academic at the University of Guelph, he is known for his scholarly criticism and translations of Latin American literature, and Lusophone African fiction.

As a journalist, he is also known for hard-hitting criticism of Canadian literature and culture.

Henighan studied political science at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he won the Potter Short Story Prize in April 1981.

From 1984 to 1992 he lived in Montreal as a freelance writer and completed an M.A. at Concordia University.

Between 1992 and 1996 he earned a doctorate in Spanish American literature at Wadham College, Oxford.

While at Oxford, Henighan became the first writer to have stories published in three different editions of the annual May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories.

He also studied in Colombia, Romania and Germany.

From 1996 to 1998 Henighan taught Latin American literature at Queen Mary & Westfield College, University of London.

Since 1999 he has taught at the University of Guelph, Ontario.

Henighan has published six novels.

His short stories have been published in Canada, the U.S., Great Britain and, in translation, in Europe, in journals such as Ploughshares, Lettre Internationale, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead., Queen's Quarterly, Prairie Fire.

Henighan's novels and stories feature immigrants, travellers and other displaced people caught between cultures.

According to the journal Canadian Literature, Henighan is "a writer who looks hard at the complexities and rebarbative elements of the multicultural, globalized world we live in."

Henighan's journalism has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Walrus, 'The Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, Adbusters and the Montreal Gazette.

Furthermore, Henighan has also written columns and feature articles for several magazines; in particular, he wrote a culture column in Geist for 20 years (from 2003 to 2023).

Born in Hamburg, Germany, Henighan arrived in Canada at the age of five and grew up in rural eastern Ontario.

From 2003 to 2023 Henighan wrote a column on Canadian and international culture in Geist.

He has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award, and the Canada Prize in the Humanities.

In 2006 Henighan set off a controversy when he attacked the Giller Prize.

As an academic, he has published articles on Latin American literature and Lusophone African fiction, a book on the Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias and a 776-page study of the analysis of the history of Nicaragua presented in the work of Ernesto Cardenal and Sergio Ramírez.

Henighan has published translations from Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian, including Angolan writer Ondjaki, Cabo Verdean writer Germano Almeida, Nicaraguan poet Carlos Rigby, and the Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian, and from 2007 to 2024 Henighan was general editor of a translation series run by Biblioasis, a literary publisher based in Windsor, Ontario.

Writers recruited by Henighan for the Biblioasis International Translation Series include Horacio Castellanos Moya, Mia Couto, Pepetela, Thomas Melle, Liliana Heker and Emili Teixidor.

As a translator, Henighan has twice been a longlist finalist for the Best Translated Book Award, and once for the International Dublin Literary Award.