The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Anna Leventhal, MFA. Anna’s graduate thesis is a novel entitled The Girl Cheese Diaries.
Anna’s short story collection Sweet Affliction (Invisible Publishing) won the 2014 Quebec Writers’ Federation Concordia University First Book Prize and was named a book of the year by CBC Books. A French translation by Daniel Grenier was published in 2015. Her writing has appeared in Geist, Maisonneuve, Lettres québécoises, carte blanche, The Puritan, and elsewhere. She was nominated for the Journey Prize and won a Quebec Writing Competition award. She was the 2021-2022 Writer-In-Residence at the Winnipeg Public Library. After many years in Montreal, Anna currently lives in Winnipeg, on Treaty 1 territory.
The Girl Cheese Diaries is a character-driven novel about a complex relationship between two women: one a young bartender and would-be artist, and the other a one-time cult cartoonist who left the art world after a dramatic falling out with her artist collective. The novel explores the dynamics of their relationship, which encompasses friendship, mentorship, admiration, obsession, and manipulation, and through which each woman’s values and commitments are tested. In off-kilter prose that’s often darkly comedic, it questions and disturbs our presumptions about what it means to be an artist today.
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