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The Cannibal Spirit

My novel, The Cannibal Spirit, is a fictionalisation of a trial for cannibalism that occurred in 1900 in Vancouver, the accused being a man of First Peoples’ parentage. The work was the product of more than ten years research on the history of the native cultures of British Columbia, the biography of the protagonist, anthropologist and chieftain George Hunt, and the more than 40 years of correspondence between him and the anthropologist Franz Boas. This included primary materials research at the British Library, the Kew Gardens Record Office, the American Philosophical Society, The Royal British Columbia Museum Archives, the University of British Columbia library and the American Museum of Natural History, as well as a field trip to Vancouver Island. As well as the novel, the research produced academic papers on George Hunt’s biography, the validity of Franz Boas’ primary data, memory and nostalgia in the process of anthropological translation from oral cultures to academic texts. This appeared in journals as diverse as ‘Medicine and Anthropology’ and ‘Memory Studies’.

Regarding the technical aspects of creative writing, the novel was the product of a PhD in creative writing, involving extensive research in craft and process, the historical novel as a genre and other comparative literatures, which led to a PhD thesis on the subject.

This 115,000 word historical novel (300-pages), emerging from over 10 years of interdisciplinary research, demonstrates 3 key hallmarks for double weighting: 1) use of abundant primary data archive sources, including 40 years of unpublished correspondence and ethnographic field-notes in multiple archives in the UK, US and Canada; 2) extensive research into disciplines including Canadian First Nations history, archaeology and geography of indigenous British Columbia, history of anthropology, circuses and freak shows of North America, languages and dialects of colonial-era Canada, 19thC Pacific maritime trade; 3) complex narrative structures based on hitherto sketchily-described biographical details of its protagonist, anthropologist George Hunt.