Matt Hughes

Late last week an agreement was reached between Five Rivers Publishing and well-known Canadian author, Matthew Hughes, to reprint his 1997 crime mystery, Downshift, and to release the unpublished sequel, Old Growth.

“We’re very pleased to give Matt’s work a home here,” says Lorina Stephens, publisher at Five Rivers.

Hughes writes fantasy and science fiction under the name Matthew Hughes, and Matt Hughes for crime fiction. He’s won the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award, and has in the past been shortlisted for the Aurora, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, and Derringer Awards.

Originally from Liverpool, England, Hughes moved to Canada with his family when he was a boy, and struggled as one of Canada’s many working poor. In his adolescence he served a year as a volunteer with the Company of Young Canadians. Later, university education was cut short, and he took a factory job making school desks, drove a grocery delivery truck, and for a time was a night janitor in a GM dealership and even worked as an orderly in a private psychiatric hospital.

As an adult, he’s plied the trade of writing first as a journalist, then as a staff speechwriter to the Canadian Ministers of Justice and Environment. From 1979 until a few years ago he worked as a freelance corporate and political speechwriter in British Columbia. He is a former director of the Federation of British Columbia Writers and used to belong to Mensa Canada. He says, “These days I’m conserving my energies to write fiction.” He goes on to say, “I’ve been married to a very patient woman since the late 1960s, and I have three grown sons.”

At the moment Matt and his wife are house-sitting in France, and hope to return to Canada late this year.

Downshift is slated for release late in 2012 in both print and digital formats, with Old Growth appearing early spring of 2013.