Deni Ellis Béchard

Deni Ellis Béchard, also known as Deni Yvan Béchard (British Columbia) is a Canadian-American novelist.

His novel, ''Vandal Love'' (2006), won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. It was a finalist for the 2009 Combat des livres, broadcast on Radio-Canada. His second book, ''Cures for Hunger'', was a memoir about growing up with his father who robbed banks, and was an Amazon.ca pick for one of the best memoirs of 2012. He has written a book of journalism, ''Of Bonobos and Men: a Journey to the Heart of the Congo'', which won the 2015 Nautilus Book Award for Investigative Journalism as well as the Nautilus Book Award Grand Prize. He coauthored ''Kuei: a Conversation on Racism'', book about racism against First Nations People in Canada, written in epistolary form with the Innu poet Natasha Kanapé-Fontaine.

His novel ''Into the Sun,'' about the Civilian Surge in Afghanistan, won the 2017 Midwest Book Award for Literary Fiction and has been described by National Book Award-winning author Phil Klay as a "Ferociously intelligent and intensely gripping portrait of the expatriate community in Kabul." It was a CLMP Firecracker Award nominee, was long-listed for the Prix des Libraires du Québec, and was selected by Radio Canada as one of 2017's Incontournables and one of the most important books of the year to be read by Canada's political leaders. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford has compared it to the work of Graham Greene and Robert Stone.

Béchard is also the author of ''White'', a novel about neocolonialism in the Congo and in Canada (Foreword Indie Book of the Year Award, bronze winner); ''My Favorite Crime: Essays and Journalism from around the World''; and ''A Song from Faraway'', a novel that tells the story of a family's legacy in wars over two centuries and on three continents. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Anita Felicelli writes, “The novel’s brilliant innovation is its adoption of a shattered form: its structure mirrors its theme of bodies and stories ruined by wars willingly fought... Tough of mind and tender of heart, its beauty is wholly entrancing.” Provided by Wikipedia