“I’ve had a lot of luck with it,” stated St. Albert native Ben Lof, modestly. “It’s been around for awhile.”
He was referring to When in the Field with Her at His Back, his short story that just won the Howard O’Hagan Award at the Alberta Book Awards Gala last Friday evening in Edmonton.
Originally published in The Malahat Review, Lof’s story is about a man who finds himself somewhat lost and alone at the end of his career. He is a recent widower and diplomat who is being forced into retirement. On his last business trip to Europe he decides that he’s just going to stay there in the hopes of finding an ex-lover from a long time ago. He ends up in Croatia on a farm and it doesn’t end well for him.
Lof wrote it in a fractured linear style, meaning that we learn the fate of the protagonist at the beginning of his story with the rest of the tale told through flashbacks. That’s not why he thinks it got the jury’s votes.
“They really liked the language: they thought it was beautiful. They thought it had this fresh take on human striving.”
For the award he was up against Devon’s Gregory Koop and Lee Kvern from Okotoks.
Lof, a finalist for the 2007 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, has already graduated with a masters in English and film studies from the University of Alberta and credits part of his success to the advice of critical advisors — established writers in their own right — that he met there.
“My thesis was under Tom Wharton; he was my supervisor. I contacted him because I wasn’t sure who I should do this thesis under and he was the fiction guy in the department. I had already made some steps with my writing by then but he definitely was a great editor working on the thesis, even an earlier version of this story.”
He listed off a number of others including Greg Hollingshead, who helped him along. “They were all incredible editors and mentors. I got a huge headstart in the fiction world with them.”
He hopes that this new success will lead his next short manuscript along a similar theme. Lof said it’s about people trying to make connections and, more often than not, failing at it. Luckily his life doesn’t imitate his art, as he has the connections and the talent to go far. He will next be published in McClelland & Stewart’s The Journey Prize Stories.
