Patrick Roscoe

Patrick Roscoe is a Canadian novelist, short story writer and actor.

Early years

Roscoe was born in Trail, British Columbia, Canada England, He later lived in Toronto, Seville, and Madrid. was noted for its unconventional subject matter, addressing themes of loneliness, desperation and survival among prostitutes, gay men and drug addicts who were living on the margins of conventional society. He later disavowed the prostitution claim, telling The Globe and Mail in 1991, "I thought, if I'm going to do [the book tour], I'm going to act, I'm going to become one of the characters in the book, I'm not going to tell anything that's the truth because that's none of (the interviewer's) business." regarding isolation as being important to him as a writer.

In his 1991 novel, God's Peculiar Care, Roscoe imagined a group of misfits obsessed by the tragic life of actress Frances Farmer. The Edmonton Journal called Roscoe "a real humdinger of a young writer."

He released a short story collection, Love Is Starving for Itself, in 1994 and a second novel, The Lost Oasis, in 1995.

Stephen Henighan discusses Roscoe as one of a group of writers whose stories "eschew historical participation in favour of a turning inward or a retreat into a kind of eternal present."

Awards

In 1996, he won a Western Magazine Award for his short story "The Last Casanova of Regina", originally published in Grain.

In 2008, he was one of 10 finalists in the Okanagan Short Story Contest.

He won first place in the short-story division of CBC Radio's literary competition in 1990.