We are stories, beginning, middle and end. Language is truth’s home. Beautiful language shapes the world, tells unadmitted truths, teaches, and delights. That’s good writing.
~Kim Echlin
About Kim
Kim Echlin is an award-winning Canadian novelist, translator, editor, and teacher. She lives in Toronto and has lived and worked in Paris, the Marshall Islands and China. For her research, writing and translation, she has visited Europe, Zimbabwe, Malawi, South Africa, Cambodia, Honduras, Pakistan, Bosnia, Egypt, Japan, Korea, and Iceland.
Her early novels, Elephant Winter and Dagmar’s Daughter, are explorations of women’s creativity and language. Her novel The Disappeared was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, won the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, and has been translated into 20 languages. Under the Visible Life was declared “nothing short of a masterpiece” by Quill & Quire. Speak, Silence was nominated for the 2022 Evergreen Award and won the 2021 Toronto Book Award.
In 2024, Kim was elected to the board of PEN International where she will continue to work on freedom of speech.
New book – coming soon! The Story of Enheduanna
Enheduanna was a Sumerian princess, priestess and poet who lived between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (contemporary Iraq) in 2300 BCE. She was the only daughter of King Sargon the Great who created the world’s first empire. She was the first person in the world to sign her own name to her poetry and she invented the idea of authorship.
She worshipped Inanna, a powerful goddess of love and justice, who protected the poor, the marginalized, the orphans and widows. Inanna was worshipped by cults of cross-dressing priests and musicians, and her temples were found throughout Sumer.
Enheduanna is a genius. She confronted the violence of empire-building. She married the moon. She was tortured with a crown of thorns and sent into exile. She wrote a cycle of 42 Temple Hymns that unified the belief systems of north and south. Her poetic masterpiece, now known as “The Exaltation of Inanna,” was copied for 2000 years after her death. Centuries before Homer and Sappho, Enheduanna claimed her own voice and fearlessly wrote the story of the most powerful woman of her time.
