Daniel Vyleta

Dan Vyleta is a novelist and cultural historian. His first novel, Pavel & I, gathered immediate international acclaim and was translated into eight languages. His second novel, The Quiet Twin, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The Crooked Maid was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the 2014 J.I. Segal Award. Dan self-describes as a Czech-German-Canadian which indicates that a) life is complicated, b) the nation state is not what it used to be and c) he is rather confused about these matters. He loves Jazz, (ice) hockey and Sveijkian strategies of resistance to power.

My research and writing focus on the ethics and aesthetics of the literature of perpetration (i.e. literature that represents complicity in violence, especially systemic violence). I am also interested in the ethical and epistemological implications of aesthetic choices made in fiction more generally, and in theories outlining the role of narrative for our lives in a wide variety of contexts. Additionally, I am interested in the boundaries between so-called genre fiction and literary fiction, with a particular interest in crime fiction, speculative/science fiction and YA fiction. My historical work focusses on antisemitism, narratives of criminality and on discursive description as a mode of knowledge.