Jane Urquhart
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
HONORARY CONFERRING
Tuesday, 6 December 2023 at 11 am
TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY DR PAUL HALFERTY, UCD SCHOOL OF ENGLISH, DRAMA AND FILM on 6 December 2023, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa on JANE URQUHART
President, Ambassador Smyth, Colleagues, UCD Graduates, and Guests, it is my great privilege to share some of the many contributions and artistic accomplishments of Jane Urquhart, to whom the University will today award an honorary doctorate.
In the Introduction to her 2017 prose work, A Number of Things: Stories of Canada told Through Fifty Objects, Urquhart explains the significance of the book’s title, which is inspired by a line of poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson: “The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.” Urquhart continues: “Itwasn't long before I realised that not everything I was writing about was happy in the way that term is often defined. [...]I liked the poem too much to change [the book’s title], however, and so, for my purposes, I opened up the word happy. In my life I have been happiest when I have been engaged with or interested in a person, an art form, a narrative, an object, the unfolding of certain events. I decided to allow the word happy to indicate a state of fascination–whether that fascination attached itself to the dark or the light, or to various shades and shadows in between” (XIII).
Jane Urquhart is one of Canada’s most celebrated and accomplished writers, and out of this happy state of fascination she has written eight internationally acclaimed novels that have enriched literature globally. Among them are The Whirlpool, which received France’s Le prix du meilleur livre étranger; Away, loosely based and largely inspired by her own family’s history of immigration from Ireland to Canada in the 1840s, winner of the Province of Ontario’s Trillium Award; The Underpainter, winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Award and a finalist for Britain’s Orange Prize; The Stone Carvers, a finalist for Canada’s Governor General’s Award and Giller Prize, and Britain’s Booker Prize. Urquhart is recipient of Canada’s Writer Trust’s Marian Engel Award and Toronto’s Harbourfront Festival Prize, she is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and an Officer of the Order of Canada. Her eagerly anticipated latest book, In Winter I Get Up at Night, will be released in early autumn 2024.
Among her many accomplishments, Uquhart has made a significant contribution to fostering connections between Ireland and Canada, spending at least part of the year living here over the last three decades. She has served on the prize juries for the Dublin IMPAC Award, for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the year Award, and in 2017-18, we at UCDwerefortunate enough to welcome her as the Craig Dobbin Visiting Chair of Canadian Studies. While serving as Chair, she organised a conference titled “Imagining: Home – Literary Connections between Ireland and Canada.”A multi-day event,it was to host a number ofinternationally acclaimed Irish and Canadian authors. In a rather unfortunate andextremely ironic turn of events, “Imagining: Home” was cancelled due to the heaviest snowfall in Ireland for more than a decade. At the time, we remarked that Urquhart had tried to bring the best of Canadian literary culture to Ireland, but, in the end, only brought the weather. A true Canadian, however, undeterred by snow, Urquhart managed to restage the event on a beautiful evening in June, when Ireland’s weather was much more hospitable — there was not even a drop of rain.
Urquhart’s novels are marked by their poetic investigation of family and friendship, culture and education, movement and migration, history and politics. Her novel Away, mines the multigenerational effects of immigration on the members and descendants of a family who leaves Ireland during the Great Famine and settles in Canada —migration having mutually and indelibly shaped the history and lives of the people of this island and those of the land now known as Canada. In the novel, the character Liam goes to the one-room schoolhouse in northern Ontario, where his father, Brian, who brought him to Canada as a small child on a coffin ship, taught the local children. Much to the dismay of, and eventual dismissal by, the district’s education authorities, Liam finds that his father had been teaching the children Irish, evidenced by a hand drawn map of the country, complete with Irish place names. In Urquhart’s words, Liam wonders “What was it that lodged the homeland so permanently and so painfully in the heart of his father? What terrible power had that particular mix of rock and soil, sea, grass, and sky that its sorrows could claim him and cause him to draw its image on a wall built in the centre of a forest thousands of miles away” (207). Education, place, movement, family, and attachments to home; graduates, as you embark on the next chapter of your life, I hope you bring with you not only the education you’ve acquired here at UCD, but that you also hold in your hearts this place and the relationships you forged here, as well as the love of your families who no doubt supported you on yourscholarly journeys. It is now my distinct pleasure to act on behalf of this University as it recognizes the remarkable achievements and contributions of one of Canada’s finest writers, a person with whom I have had the privilege to work closely, and who I am also very proud to call my dear friend.
Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hanc meam filiam, quam scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneam esse quae admittatur, honoris causa, ad Gradum Doctoratus in Litteris; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.