Tanyo Ravicz

Tanyo Ravicz's most recent book is Alaskans (2008), a selection of his short fiction from the previous decade. He is the author of the prize-winning novel A Man of His Village (2006) and the collection Ring of Fire and Other Stories (2004). Tanyo Ravicz was born in Mexico City and grew up in Los Angeles. In 1983 he worked as an editorial assistant at The Paris Review in New York. He graduated from Harvard University in 1984.

After living on the East Coast and in Europe, Ravicz moved to Alaska and stayed fifteen years. He worked as a firefighter, a day laborer, a cannery hand and a schoolteacher, and he homesteaded land on Kodiak Island, where he returns every summer. Alaska fired his passion for the natural world and became a focus of his writing. He resides in California with his family.


                Author photo by Mark Davidson


From the Author's Note to Alaskans:

My pianist friend tells me that she begins her concerts with a short piece in order to warm up the ears of her audience. This preface is meant to be my short piece.  Read on>


The author on A Man of His Village:

"It is, I hope, more than an adventure novel or a study of an obsessed character. It's the human personality under every kind of duress, physical, emotional, social and spiritual. Poverty, immigration, and the harshness of the labor market are constant realities. But Florentino is not only brutalized by events---he is victimized by his own illusions. Ultimately what he seeks, a priceless wild mushroom growing in the heart of a desolation, a gold for the gilded 1990s, isn't attainable. What he may recover, if he survives, is self-acceptance and a more forgiving vision of the world."

The author on Ring of Fire and Other Stories:

"There's a different variety of people you get at the extreme end of the empire---less varnished, less smoothed down by education."

---Palisadian-Post interview

"What matters most, after your readers and your art, is the writers who have passed on. They're the ones who give you a pat on the back when you've done well. As a writer, you feel this. Hank Waters is a monster poet. He's as big as the wild country he inhabits, as unknowable, as violent, as imperiled and as beautiful. There is Brontë and Byron in him, and Jack London and Faulkner and William Shakespeare. In the future other writers will create other monster poets."



Contact: tanyo@tanyo.net