Book Festival @ the Roberts Library: 2013 Guest Author

Award-winning novelist Terry Kay was born in Hart County, Georgia, the eleventh of twelve children. He was reared on a farm and was graduated from West Georgia Junior College and LaGrange College, earning a degree in Social Science, with extensive study in theater arts. He began his career in journalism in 1959 at the Decatur-DeKalb News, a weekly newspaper in Decatur (GA) and later worked for The Atlanta Journal as a sportswriter and, for eight years, as one of America’s leading film-theater critics.

Kay’s first novel, published in 1976, was The Year the Lights Came On, a story inspired by his memory of the coming of electricity to his rural community. It was followed in 1981 by After Eli, a disturbing view of a charming Irish actor terrorizing an Appalachian community. In 1984, Dark Thirty, an examination of justice vs. vengeance, also set in Appalachia, was published.

In 1990, Kay’s signature novel, To Dance With the White Dog, was released, quickly taking its place among Southern literary classics and establishing Kay as one of the region’s foremost writers. Inspired by Kay’s own parents, it is the story of an octogenarian and a mysterious white dog that comes to live with him following the death of his wife of 57 years. To Dance With the White Dog earned Kay the Outstanding Author of the Year award in 1991 from the Southeastern Library Association. The book was twice nominated for the American Booksellers’ Book of the Year (ABBY) award and was named by the Georgia Center for the Book as one of the 25 recommended books for all Georgians to read. In 1993 it was presented as a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie for CBS television, starring Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. The production earned the highest television rating of the 1993 season, with more than 33 million viewers. Cronyn won that year’s Emmy for Best Actor in the role of Sam Peek, the character based on Kay’s father.

Translations of Kay’s fiction have been published in numerous foreign countries, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Sweden, Germany and Holland. His work has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including Reader’s Digest, Atlanta Magazine, A Confederacy of Crime and The Chattahoochee Review. He scripted an episode of In the Heat of the Night and won a Southern Emmy for his original teleplay, Run Down the Rabbit. He is also the author of a play, Piano Cabaret.

Biography from Terry Kay's website (www.terrykay.com)