Kevin Chong
Works by Kevin Chong:
From ABC BookWorld, "Chong grew up in Vancouver, graduated from UBC's Creative Writing program and received an MFA at Columbia University in New York City. His first novel Baroque-a-Nova is a coming-of-age story described by the publisher as a 'bitingly humorous take on the music business'. On the Monday he gets the boot from school for protesting a book ban, Saul St. Pierre, 18, learns his folksinger Mom, who abandoned him in his infancy, has committed suicide in Thailand. While coping with the influx of publicity resulting from his famous mother's death and the revival of her music due to a cover version by a German post-punk band, the protagonist leads a student walk-out in defence of a banned book that he has never read. "The intention was street theatre, a counter spectacle. Underneath the overcast sky, on the bleachers before the soccer field, sat Hedda, wearing a tiara made of aluminum foil, a huge, costume-issue ruby necklace, and a strapless ball gown, maroon and crushed velvet, with a sash across it reading, 'Miss Police State 1998'. She held at her side a bullhorn, which she handed over to Navi, who proceeded to direct the thirty-five members of Rent-a-Mob in the middle of the field... There were two or three men in dog collars, two women with neon-blue hair, a man wearing a rubber Pierre Trudeau mask, a woman with a "Take It Sleazy" t-shirt. They held signs carrying abusive slogans, some with no apparent political content like "Eat My Ass."...These days, to assert your presence in the world, you needed, really big signs." The novel shares its name with a jukebox in Helen's Grill, a greasy spoon on Main Street.
Chong's second book, Neil Young Nation (Greystone, 2005), is about the importance of Neil Young and his music in Chong's life. "This is strange but true," he writes, "everything I know about being young I learned from Neil Young, a jowly man approximately twice my age and now hurtling toward senior citizenship."
Chong's third book, Beauty Plus Pity (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011), is about Malcolm Kwan, a twenty-something Vancouverite struggling to become a model. Upon his father's death and his fiancee's desertion, he discovers that at some point his father had an affair, resulting in his teenaged half-sister, Hadley. As he embarks on discovering more about his father's love child, he develops a friendship that proves to be exactly what he needed.
Kevin Chong's My Year of the Racehorse: Falling in Love with the Sport of Kings (Greystone 2012) was featured on the cover of B.C. BookWorld. [See below]
A follow-up book on horse racing, Northern Dancer (Viking 2014) requires no subtitle. The Canadian thoroughbred horse that won two of the Triple Crown races in 1964, as well as Canada's Queen's Plate, has become the most influential stallion in the sport of kings. An estimated seventy percent of thoroughbreds alive today are his descendants. For example, sixteen of the seventeen horses in the Queen's Plate in 2011 were Northern Dancer's grandchildren. Eighteen of the nineteen horses in the 2011 Kentucky Derby were his descendants. To mark the 50th anniversary of Northern Dancer's win at the Kentucky Derby, Chong was hired to provide a novelistic retelling of how Northern Dancer won the hearts of most Canadians in 1964."
He presented at the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts in 2015.