Elyse Friedman


Elyse Friedman was raised in North York, Ontario.

Education and career

Elyse Friedman is a graduate of the CFC. />

Personal life

Elyse Friedman lives in Toronto.

Awards and accomplishments

Elyse Friedman has published three novels, one book of short stories, and a book of poems. Her work has been shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award, the Trillium Book Award and the Relit Award. Her story, The Soother, won the Gold National Magazine Award for fiction. Her stories have appeared in the Journey Prize Anthology, Best Canadian Stories and various literary journals and anthologies in Canada and the United States. Elyse's screenplay "Better Now" received the TIFF-CBC Screenwriter Award Jury Prize in 2019. In 2020, her screenplay "The Relationship Experiment" won the TIFF-CBC Screenwriter Award.

Published works

Films and screenplays

A comedy about a 40-year-old novelist who falls in love with a writer who is much younger. Originally titled Show & Tell, Suddenly Naked appeared on film festival screens in places such as Toronto, Berlin, Vancouver and Hawaii. This movie earned six Genie Award nominations, including Best Picture, and won an award for best editing.
In Then Again, Friedman "Fashions characters who go to extraordinary lengths in their efforts to escape or recapture the past; as they discover the high price that accompanies the knowledge that neither of these things is possible." Then Again highlights the "limits of family loyalty and the necessity of choosing to live for oneself when the demand of others becomes intolerable." Friedman has said that she wrote this book because she "wanted to talk about the lingering effects on the children of holocaust survivors. There’s a residue that remains and has an effect on children. also wanted to explore the ideas of subjective memory – how different siblings can have different takes on the same environment." Then Again is a prominent book in bookstores and is published by Random House.
In Long Story Short, Friedman has put together a collection of short stories that "document the lives of six perverse and eccentric protagonists who share one common characteristic: living lives that have somehow gone off kilter" Long Story Short was published by Anansi.
The Answer to Everything, 2014

Poetry