FIRST NAME: Christopher

LAST NAME: Gatchalian

CITY/TOWN: Vancouver, BC

PLACE OF BIRTH: Vancouver, BC

EMPLOYMENT OTHER THAN WRITING: Managing Editor, Talonbooks; freelance pianist

AWARDS: Winner, Federation of BC Writers Festival of the Arts Literary Competition, 1995; Finalist, Pacific Northwest Writers Conference Literary Competition (Playwriting); two UBC Creative Writing scholarhips

Born in 1974 and raised in Vancouver, Gatchalian is a Filipino-Canadian who had written nine plays by 2019. His first non-fiction book is a memoir, Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty, and The Making of a Brown Queer Man, promoted as a "poetic love letter to the art that inspired Gatchalian while simultaneously exposing its oppressive, heteronormative and white legacies that invisibilized him as a queer person of colour."

His own website describes his play Falling in Time thus: "Set in Vancouver in 1994, the year of the death of North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung, the play criss-crosses two hemispheres and spans more than forty years. Through all this, four distinctly different lives intertwine. Steve is an aging, outrageous, bisexual Korean War vet who embodies the sadistic tendencies of Western imperialism that polite society has too often tried to sweep from view. Jamie is an aloof, repressed ESL teacher haunted by a troubled childhood. Chang Hyun is a young Korean student brimming with anti-Western sentiment and still reeling from a traumatic experience in the military. In the middle of it all is Eun Ha, a woman who lives through the Korean War and, against all odds, finds the will to survive. A brutally honest depiction of war, rape, racism and animal sexuality."

Gatchalian is a two-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award who studied Creative Writing and Theatre at the University of British Columbia (BFA, 1996; MFA, 2002). His first play, Motifs & Repetitions, aired on Canada's Bravo! channel in 1997 and on the Knowledge Network series Independent Eye in 1998. His next play, Claire, was produced in Vancouver in 1998. His features and arts criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including Xtra! West, the Vancouver Sun, and the Georgia Straight.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Motifs & Repetitions & Other Plays (The New Hogarth Press, 2003)

Motifs & Repetitions & Other Plays (The Writers' Collective 2003) 978-1932133493

Tor/sion (Ranson Works Press 2005)

Broken (New Bard Press 2006) 978-184728866

Crossing & Other Plays (Lethe Press Maple Shade, New Jersey 2010)

Falling in Time (Scirocco 2012)

Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty, and the Making of a Brown Queer Man. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019. 224 pages. 9781551527536 (pbk) $18.95

[BCBW 2019]