All the Lonely People Collected Stories

Callaghan’s writing is wide ranging but often takes on the perspective of a marginalized individual’s view of the human experience. These tales are told in a variety of voices: street hustlers, priests, blues singers, Holocaust survivors, cross-dressers, paramilitary snipers, even those we may euphemistically consider the “ordinary”—all of them authentic, and all would subscribe to the maxim that “happiness is overrated.” The dialogue is true to speech as it is spoken, shot through with humour, piercing sadness and puzzling beauty.

For thirty-eight years, Barry Callaghan was a professor of contemporary literature at York University in Toronto, and is now Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Scholar at that institution. Callaghan has been awarded the Foundation For The Advancement of Canadian Letters award for fiction, the City of Toronto Award, seven National Magazine Awards, two President’s Medal Awards for Excellence (NMA), the ACTRA Award for television host of the year, the Pushcart, White, and Lowell Thomas Awards in the U.S., and the inaugural W. O. Mitchell Award for a body of work. Callaghan has also been awarded honorary doctorates by the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the University of Guelph.