The School of Creative Writing is pleased to congratulate Elisabeth Shenher, MFA. Elisabeth’s graduate thesis is a novel entitled Darkening Ground.
Elisabeth Shenher is originally from Edmonton, where she completed her BA in Anthropology and English at the University of Alberta. In her work, she explores issues around climate change, class, and popular culture. Recently, Elisabeth has been expanding to write screenplays and graphic forms. Her flash fiction has won the Australian Writers’ Centre’s Furious Fiction contest and been longlisted for Room Magazine’s Short Forms contest. In 2019, she attended the Emerging Writers’ Intensive Workshop at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking, buying books that she swears she’ll read one day, and yoga.
Elisabeth’s novel, Darkening Ground, follows three generations of women. Starting in the high Arctic in 2002, the story follows Claire, a young researcher who studies Arctic Terns–a little bird with a migration route from pole to pole. In the present, Claire’s daughter Zoe stumbles as she searches for stability in an increasingly chaotic world. In the future, Zoe’s daughter Nora starts a race against time to find a cure for the prion disease that lies dormant in her and her young neighbour, Jude. Darkening Ground explores the climate crisis through themes of care, motherhood, and hope.
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