who the better writer ...

8)

yuh read all of them?

the Canadian 

yes , short stories.

I read Lawrence and Atwood more than 40 years ago in school here in Canada....

Margaret Lawrence was easier for me but boring..irrelevant.  Gabrielle Roy seemed most relevant.  but her name is not on the list is it?

all middle class elitist people who don't have a clue about the whole of the life..life at the bottom of Canadian society..especially where it intersected with the impact of immigrants then burgeoning, starting up and roiling and what it portended for Canada.

I did it for school.  I would not have read them otherwise..even Roy who explored ordinary Quebec life..containing themes I was much more familiar with

I don't know Findley

I have lost interest in the technical aspects of writing as arbiter literary quality..save where I encounter creativity in the conveyance of meaning..especially when the content in question is the stock of ordinary life bubbling towards the progressive and revolutionary.

by that measurement I can spend days, all day long with Naipaul on his west indian books..or James on cricket BaB

if writing is not usefully relevant it means little to me..I pass it by.

I am tired of the middle class to wealthy experience as determinative content of things literary... television, films, food, dress etc.  truly tired of it.  if I read it must be progressive, exploratory and explanatory, and indicative of ways forward for humans

I am sure if one spends the necessary time with Lawrence and Atwood they would find the progressive in their work.  I never found it and stopped looking quickly

Timothy Findley:

Quote:One of three sons, Findley was born in Toronto, Ontario, to Allan Gilmour Findley, a stockbroker, and his wife, the former Margaret Maude Bull. His paternal grandfather was president of Massey-Harris, the farm-machinery company. He was raised in the upper class Rosedale district of the city,[2] attending boarding school at St. Andrew's College (although leaving during grade 10 for health reasons). He pursued a career in the arts, studying dance and acting, and had significant success as an actor before turning to writing. He was part of the original Stratford Festival company in the 1950s,[1] acting alongside Alec Guinness, and appeared in the first production of Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker at the Edinburgh Festival.[1] He also played Peter Pupkin in Sunshine Sketches, the CBC Television adaptation of Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.
Though Findley had declared his homosexuality as a teenager, he married actress/photographer Janet Reid in 1959, but the union lasted only three months and was dissolved by divorce or annulment two years later.[2] Eventually he became the domestic partner of writer Bill Whitehead, whom he met in 1962. Findley and Whitehead also collaborated on several documentary projects in the 1970s, including the television miniseries The National Dream and Dieppe 1942.[2]

I think I would find Munro useful.

Quote:Many of Munro's stories are set in Huron County, Ontario. Her strong regional focus is one of the features of her fiction. Another is the omniscient narrator who serves to make sense of the world. Many compare Munro's small-town settings to writers of the U.S. rural South. Her female characters, though, are more complex. Much of Munro's work exemplifies the literary genre known as Southern Ontario Gothic.[8]
Munro's work is often compared with the great short story writers. In Munro stories, as in Chekhov's, plot is secondary and "little happens." As with Chekhov, Garan Holcombe notes: "All is based on the epiphanic moment, the sudden enlightenment, the concise, subtle, revelatory detail." Munro's work deals with "love and work, and the failings of both. She shares Chekhov’s obsession with time and our much-lamented inability to delay or prevent its relentless movement forward."[9]
A frequent theme of her work—particularly evident in her early stories—has been the dilemmas of a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her family and the small town she grew up in. In recent work such as Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) and Runaway (2004) she has shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, of women alone and of the elderly. It is a mark of her style for characters to experience a revelation that sheds light on, and gives meaning to, an event.
Munro's prose reveals the ambiguities of life: "ironic and serious at the same time," "mottoes of godliness and honor and flaming bigotry," "special, useless knowledge," "tones of shrill and happy outrage," "the bad taste, the heartlessness, the joy of it." Her style places the fantastic next to the ordinary with each undercutting the other in ways that simply, and effortlessly, evoke life.[10] As Robert Thacker notes: "Munro's writing creates ... an empathetic union among readers, critics most apparent among them. We are drawn to her writing by its verisimilitude—not of mimesis, so-called and... 'realism'—but rather the feeling of being itself... of just being a human being."[11] Many critics have asserted that Munro's stories often have the emotional and literary depth of novels. The question of whether Munro actually writes short-stories or novels has often been asked. Alex Keegan, writing in Eclectica, has a simple answer: "Who cares? In most Munro stories there is as much as in many novels."[

I neglected Lawrence Hill because of who his parents were..his father really.  I saw Dan Hill not as he was portrayed in the media..as a great positive black figure..but as the opposite of that.  but now that I am reminded I will go look for "Black Berry Sweet Juice"

in fact I will look for it on the net right now.  maybe I will get a free read.  nutten better dan free! ::LOL::

Quote:Hill was born in 1957 in Newmarket, Ontario, the son of American immigrants to Canada — a black father and a white mother. Hill has written in his bestselling memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice of how his
parents — social activist Donna Hill and social scientist/public servant Daniel G. Hill — met, married, left the United States the day after they married in 1953 in Washington, D.C., and raised a family in Toronto. Growing up in the 1960s in Don Mills, a predominantly white suburb of Toronto, Hill was very influenced by his parents' human rights work and would go on to explore in his writing themes related to identity and belonging.[1][2]
Hill earned a B.A. in economics from Laval University in Quebec City and an M.A. in writing from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He was a reporter with The Globe and Mail and parliamentary correspondent for The Winnipeg Free Press.
Having lived and worked in Baltimore, in Spain and in France, Hill currently lives in Hamilton, Ontario, with his wife and five children. His brother is singer-songwriter Dan Hill.
Writing career

i read the older text  in high school and, the prose/syntax/lexicon can be difficult.