Matthew Hooton grew up on Vancouver Island and obtained a BA in Writing from the University of Victoria. He went on to publish non-fiction in several Canadian newspapers and magazines, before moving to England and completing an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, where his manuscript for his first novel, Deloume Road (Knopf $29.95) received the inaugural Greene & Heaton Prize for the best novel to emerge from the Bath Spa MA in Creative Writing. Hooton has worked as an editor and teacher in South Korea. Matthew is currently living in South Australia, working towards his PhD.
According to his publisher, "Deloume Road takes us into a hot August month on Vancouver Island during the first Gulf War, to a small rural community where the children's lives play out unchangingly in the woods and secret places - until they discover an object from the past that will come to haunt them all. Slowly we discover how intertwined are the lives of recent comers with long-established neighbours: a Ukrainian butcher who yearns for his wife and small son left behind - and learns something disturbing; a widowed Korean girl who fears for the life of the baby she is carrying; a Native artist whose pilot son has crashed in the wilderness... And behind them all, the shadow of Gerard Deloume, whose suicide in 1899 set off a sequence of events that erupt a century later with violent, tragic consequences."