Member Profile

The author of a clutch of novels, plays, film scripts and short story and poetry collections, MICHAEL MIROLLA describes his writing as a mix of magic realism, surrealism, speculative fiction and meta-fiction. Publications include three Bressani Prize winners: the novel Berlin (2010); the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue (2014); and the short story collection Lessons in Relationship Dyads (2016). Other novels include: The Facility, which features among other things a string of cloned Mussolinis; Torp: The Landlord, The Husband, The Wife and The Lover, set in 1970 Vancouver during the War Measures Act; and The Giulio Metaphysics III, a novel/linked short story collection wherein a character named “Giulio” battles for freedom from his own creator. Other publications: the short story collections The Formal Logic of Emotion, The Photographer in Search of Death, and Paradise Island & Other Galaxies; a punk novella, The Ballad of Martin B.; and two collections of poetry: Light and Time, and At the End of the World. A novella, The Last News Vendor received a Reader’s View Award and took the 2020 Hamilton Literary Award for fiction. The short story, “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence,” was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology; and both “The Sand Flea” and “Casebook: In The Matter of Father Dante Lazaro” were a Pushcart Prize nominees. In the fall of 2019, Michael served a three-month writer’s residency at the Historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, during which time he finished the first draft of a novel, The Second Law of Thermodynamics. Three of his plays—Gargoyles, Snails, and A Revised Experiment—have received professional production. Gargoyles won the Canadian One-Act Playwriting Competition. Born in Italy and raised in Montreal, Michael now makes his home in Hamilton. For more information, http://www.michaelmirolla.com/index.html.