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Author, musician Paul Quarrington dead at 56 after battle with cancer
1/21/2010
TORONTO -- Paul Quarrington, the multi-talented, award-winning Toronto author of "Whale Music," has died. He was 56.
"He passed peacefully at home in Toronto in the early hours surrounded by friends and family," said a statement on his website. "It is comforting to know that he didn't suffer; he was calm and quiet holding hands with those who were closest to him."
Quarrington, who was diagnosed with an advanced form of lung cancer last year, maintained a wide-ranging creative career over the past decades as a playwright, musician, writer and filmmaker.
He achieved perhaps his greatest success as a novelist and author.
He won the Governor General's Literary Award for English-language fiction in 1989 for "Whale Music," which Penthouse magazine called "the best novel written about rock 'n' roll" upon its release.
He also won the Stephen Leacock Award for humour and the Canada Reads competition for "King Leary," and has twice been a finalist for the Trillium Book Award.
Two of his more recent books -- 2008's "The Ravine" and 2004's "Galveston" -- were finalists for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Quarrington's work ranged from novels to non-fiction, with a wide array of subject matter. What was consistent, however, was his keen sense of humour, along with a focus early in his career on down-and-out protagonists who slowly begin reconnecting with the outside world.
A lover of sports and music, Quarrington wrote celebrated literature about topics that were otherwise not considered highbrow. "King Leary," for instance, was about a retired hockey player living in a nursing home, while "Whale Music" follows a Brian Wilson-esque rocker-turned-recluse.
"Exploring those subjects in kind of an interesting way -- if he hadn't done that, there wouldn't have been any other example really of someone who was working in fiction and writing about those things and writing great books," former Rheostatics frontman Dave Bidini told The Canadian Press in an interview last year.
"I think, in a lot of ways my writing has been designed around Paul's work, his body of work. ... I was just blown away by this writing, and that it was a guy who basically worked at a book shop on Yonge Street, a guy from the neighbourhood, I guess. He just made it seem possible that stuff like this could be done."
Quarrington also had an extensive career in film and television.
He won a Genie Award for best screenplay for "Perfectly Normal," the 1991 comedy he co-wrote with Eugene Lipinski, and his 1994 film adaptation of "Whale Music" also earned for a number of Genie nominations.
Quarrington was also up for a Gemini Award for best writing in a dramatic series for an episode of "Due South," while he served as executive story editor for the 1998 CTV series "Power Play."
Yet Quarrington's creative career began with music. He played guitar, clarinet, squeeze box, bass, harp and piano and produced a No. 1 single in Canada with 1980's "Baby and the Blues," written with Martin Worthy, whom he met in 1973.
Worthy's partnership with Quarrington has endured. They played together in the Porkbelly Futures, a band that fused blues, jazz and country, up until Quarrington's death.
Quarrington sounded positive despite the diagnosis during a June 2009 interview with The Canadian Press, conducted shortly after he learned of the illness.
But he did say that his experience could factor into the projects he was working on.
"I think I said somewhat jokingly that a lot of the new material is kinda weepy and maudlin since the diagnosis, which isn't entirely true," he said at the time. "But the phrase, `that changes everything' -- in connection with the diagnosis -- struck me as really kind of profound in a very simple manner.
"It does change the way you think about most things, the work you're doing, the songs you're writing. So I think its influence will be there, sure."
Quarrington leaves behind two children, Carson Lara and Flannery.
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