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Sharon Butala
I’ve spent most of my life in Saskatchewan where I was born, raised, educated, married (twice) and expected to die. Except that my husband of thirty-one years died in August 2007 thereby changing any plan I ever had. It is virtually axiomatic that farm/ranch wives have to leave the land when they lose their husbands, and try as I did, I am no different. I came to Calgary in October, 2008, because my only child lives here with his wife and my two grandchildren, and I wanted to be near them. It’s still hard to think of myself as an Alberta writer, and I imagine that most of my readers never will. Yet, here I am, and I expect these new, extremely interesting surroundings will begin to show up in my writing.
When I first began writing about 1978, I chose as my subject the lives of the rural, agricultural people of southwest Saskatchewan where I lived on a cattle ranch. For the most part, I have stuck to that subject matter, although I might as easily have been writing about southeast Albertans or indeed, rural, agricultural people almost anywhere in Canada. I did that because their lives were a mystery to me until I became – more or less – one of them, and then I wrote about them because no one else was and I thought that both they and their extraordinary landscape were beautiful, noble, often terrible, and especially, still echoed every day with elements of what is called ‘the great round of being,’ that is harder to see in urban lives. Every day, I felt, I lived inside the human past, the place from where we all came. This was the perception that drove my work. And, there was nature. Very few living Canadian writers can claim a lifetime – especially the writing years- lived virtually exclusively in the countryside: bush homestead, tiny pioneer villages, a cattle ranch and a hay farm. Everything I wrote was governed by what I had come to understand about the nature of nature. If I mourn anything now, it is the loss of that life lived in the landscape.
But I am still alive, and still writing, and find the urban sprawl, urban speed, and its ten thousand distractions, its noisy confusion, and the steady living beat beneath all that, pretty darn interesting too.
I am working on an historical novel (1884 to about 1920) set in the Cypress Hills and about a successful woman pioneer, but the next book may well shift gears entirely.
Awards
Long Fiction Award, Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild, 1982
Major Drama Award, Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild, 1985, short-listed
Best First Novel, Books in Canada, 1985
Governor General Award for Fiction, 1986, short-listed
Major Drama Award, Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild, 1989
Member Achievement Award, Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild, 1991
Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, 1991, short-listed
CBC Awards, CBC, 1991, short-listed
First, Canadian Authors’ Association, 1992
Governor General Award for Non-fiction, 1994, short-listed
Book of the Year, Saskatchewan Book Awards, 1995, short-listed
Author of the Year, Canadian Booksellers’ Association, 1995, short-listed
Gold, Western Magazine Awards, 1996
Marion Engel Award for Women in Mid-Career, 1998
Honorary Doctor of Laws, University of Regina, 2000
Officer, Order of Canada, 2002
Queen’s Jubilee Medal, Province of Alberta, 2002
Honorary Doctor of Letters, University of Saskatchewan, 2004
Saskatchewan Order of Merit, 2009
