David Demchuk is a Canadian playwright and novelist,[1] who received a longlisted Scotiabank Giller Prize nomination in 2017 for his debut novel The Bone Mother.[2]
Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba,[2] of Ukrainian descent,[3] he moved to Toronto, Ontario in 1984.
His plays have included Rosalie Sings Alone (1985),[4] If Betty Should Rise (1985),[5] Touch (1986),[6] The World We Live On Turns So That the Sun Appears to Rise (1987),[1] Stay (1990), Mattachine (1991),[7] Thieves in the Night (1992)[8] and The Power of Invention.[9] He received a special Dora Mavor Moore Award in 1986 for Touch.[10] In 1992, Touch was included in Making Out, the first anthology of Canadian plays by gay writers, alongside works by Ken Garnhum, Sky Gilbert, Daniel MacIvor, Harry Rintoul and Colin Thomas.[11]
After the mid-1990s, Demchuk stopped writing new plays, concentrating on his work at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and on writing scripts for radio, film and television.[12] In 1999, he wrote the radio drama Alice in Cyberspace, a contemporary reworking of Alice in Wonderland which aired for ten episodes on CBC Radio's This Morning.[13] His other radio dramas included Alaska, The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Winter Market. In June 2012, he became a contributing writer for the online magazine Torontoist.[14]
The Bone Mother was published in 2017 by ChiZine Publications.[15] It was the first horror-themed novel ever to receive a nomination for the Giller, an award more commonly associated with conventional literary fiction rather than genre fiction.[16] The book was a shortlisted finalist for the 2018 amazon.ca First Novel Award.[17] His new novel, RED X, published by Strange Light, an imprint of Penguin Random House, was released on August 31, 2021.[18]