About George Ryga
Born in Deep Creek, a remote Ukrainian community in the Athabasca region of northern Alberta, George Ryga is a founding father of
Canadian literature, theatre and culture. The harsh realities of his upbringing - an unforgiving landscape, poverty, and isolation - are
recurring themes in his work.
Largely self-taught, he published his first book of poetry in his late teens and garnered accolades in 1967 with the premiere of a play
that is perhaps his most famous work, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe.
Throughout his career, Ryga criticized social issues in Canada through an austere examination of his characters, becoming an outspoken champion for the underprivileged.
Known for his stark rural settings and a recognizable array of colourful characters, all of whom take us in many pleasurable, disturbing and revealing directions, Ryga offers readers characters with opportunities for redemption, survival and self-determination.
"All of Ryga's plays and novels were propelled by compassion and moral outrage," noted the Globe & Mail, “but also by a peculiar and personal awareness of the life and death of human cultures and the values they contain.”
One of his early novels, HUNGRY HILLS examines the role of the disaffected in the mainstream consciousness of Canadian society by dramatizing the effects of isolation and the condition and psychology of stigmatized individuals in the face of societal neglect.
In enduring the prejudice and isolation his community has imposed upon him, and by insisting on his right to inclusion within that society, Snit Mandolin speaks for everyone who has suffered injustice at the hands of society-at-large. His journey is one of heart-breaking discovery and the heroics of simple survival that mirror the life of the author himself.
Though unapologetically Canadian in their location and circumstance, the central themes in Ryga’s work address the general human condition and speak to audiences around the world.
“George Ryga has taken the human experience, which in this case is only
Canadian by accident of destiny, distilled it through his fine sense of compassion
and given it to us…as an act of communion in which our own participation is
inescapable,” said Ben Metcalfe of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
George Ryga died in 1985 in Summerland, British Columbia. In 1996 the
George Ryga Centre Society was established in Ryga’s former home in
Summerland, where it functions as a cultural centre in memory of the author’s
contribution to Canadian culture.
The centre has hosted writers such as Sandra Birdsell (The Russlander, The Two-Headed Calf) and supports the annual George Ryga Award for Societal
Awareness in Literature, granted to a writer who has achieved an outstanding
degree of social awareness in a new book publication.
George Ryga is remembered as one of Canada’s most prolific and powerful writers. His relevance to this day is confirmed by the fact that The Ecstasy of
Rita Joe was running at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa while the feature film
adaptation of his novel Hungry Hills was in production in Regina, SK.
The novel is currently collected in the volume George Ryga: The Prairie Novels
(Talonbooks).
