Christine Miscione
Fiction Writer
Christine Miscione is a Canadian fiction writer. She completed an Honours Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts, both in English Literature, at McMaster University and Queen's University, respectively. She also holds a Bachelor of Education in Language Arts.
Her work has appeared in various literary journals such as This Magazine, Lemon Hound, and The Puritan. In 2011, she was the recipient of the Hamilton Arts Award for Best Emerging Writer. In 2012, her story "Skin, Just" won first place in the Gloria Vanderbilt/Exile Editions CVC Short Fiction Contest.
Christine's debut short fiction collection Auxiliary Skins was published in 2013 and won the 2014 Relit Award for short fiction. In 2014 she published her first novel, Carafola, which was shortlisted for the Hamilton Literary Awards. More recently, Christine was a finalist for the 2018 KM Hunter Award for Literature, and won third place in both PRISM International's inaugural prize for short fiction and Prairie Fire's annual short fiction competition for her stories "The Water" and "Tessa".
Christine is a member of the LitLive Reading Series. She is currently at work on a short fiction collection and novel.
Miscione excels at writing about horrible things in beautiful ways. Her prose is not only deft and neat, but often wrenchingly lovely, so that much of the text comes across like a suppurating wound wrapped in hand-stitched lace.
Miscione carries otherwise simple (though absurd) slice-of-life sketches with a vivid and powerful style… Existential terror never felt so fun.
Deeply felt prose… a spare control that turns the reader’s imagination loose, stories in which serious moments of childlike whimsy seem sardonically aged, stories in which the death of anything is a revelation of the life that is in everything.
The results of the mad experiments in Christine Miscione’s laboratory are sometimes twisted and grotesque, occasionally beautiful, often frustrating and challenging and audacious. A few are even heartbreaking. But they are always magnificent mutants. Canadian literature would be enriched by more such laboratories!
No one writes stories or sentences quite like these, and her originality is as strong as her imagination. It’s a rare treat to read a book so engrossing you know your review won’t do it justice. This is honest, impressive, visceral writing, stylishly polished and full of punch.
I greatly admire the pared-down writing of "Skin, Just". It hits gut bone. A haunting story, truly amazing. Not a word amiss. I kept thinking about it long after my reading. And still do.
