Deni Ellis Béchard
Canadian American writer
Deni Ellis Béchard, also known as Deni Yvan Béchard, is a Canadian-American novelist.
His novel, Vandal Love (2006), won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. It was a finalist for the 2009 Combat des livres, broadcast on Radio-Canada. His second book, Cures for Hunger, was a memoir about growing up with his father who robbed banks, and was an Amazon.ca pick for one of the best memoirs of 2012. He has written a book of journalism, Of Bonobos and Men: a Journey to the Heart of the Congo, which won the 2015 Nautilus Book Award for Investigative Journalism as well as the Nautilus Book Award Grand Prize. He coauthored Kuei: a Conversation on Racism, book about racism against First Nations People in Canada, written in epistolary form with the Innu poet Natasha Kanapé-Fontaine.
His novel Into the Sun, about the Civilian Surge in Afghanistan, won the 2017 Midwest Book Award for Literary Fiction and has been described by National Book Award-winning author Phil Klay as a "Ferociously intelligent and intensely gripping portrait of the expatriate community in Kabul." It was a CLMP Firecracker Award nominee, was long-listed for the Prix des Libraires du Québec, and was selected by Radio Canada as one of 2017's Incontournables and one of the most important books of the year to be read by Canada's political leaders. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford has compared it to the work of Graham Greene and Robert Stone.
Béchard is also the author of White, a novel about neocolonialism in the Congo and in Canada (Foreword Indie Book of the Year Award, bronze winner); My Favorite Crime: Essays and Journalism from around the World; and A Song from Faraway, a novel that tells the story of a family's legacy in wars over two centuries and on three continents. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Anita Felicelli writes, “The novel’s brilliant innovation is its adoption of a shattered form: its structure mirrors its theme of bodies and stories ruined by wars willingly fought...
The public source identifies “Deni Ellis Béchard” as canadian American writer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Deni, Ellis and Béchard.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3022978. VIAF identifies the subject as 66796450. The Library of Congress control number is no2006066722. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2006, 2007, 2009 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Deni Ellis Béchard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.