Chantel Lavoie’s fiction has appeared in The Humber Literary Review, and her poetry in journals such as Prairie Fire, Arc, and Canadian Literature. Winner of a Books in Canada poetry award, shortlisted for the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry and the Malahat Review Open Season Award, she has published two collections of verse, Where the Terror Lies (2012) and This is About Angels, Women, and Men (2021). Chantel is a professor of literature at the Royal Military College of Canada, where she specializes in eighteenth-century boyhood. Her nonfiction book, Imagining Boys in the Eighteenth Century: Age, Gender, and Class, is forthcoming from University of Delaware Press, and her first nonfiction work, Collecting Women, Poetry and Lives 1700-1786, was published by Bucknell University Press in 2009. She lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, with her husband, two dogs, two cats, and two boys.
Chantel’s debut literary historical novel, THE BOY IN THE CHIMNEY, follows four young chimney sweeps through the soot and suffering of indentured labour in late-18th-century London, and the brilliant Swiss watchmaker and son who set up shop on the boys’ Covent Garden turf. As the sweeps scrabble to survive a precarious and impoverished existence, the watchmaker showcases astonishing inventions to dazzle the upper crust, illuminating a world of wealth and opportunity out of reach to all but the privileged—and those daring few willing to risk everything for a chance at something more. Steeped in historical fact, THE BOY IN THE CHIMNEY is a profound and evocative exploration of class, commerce, and the value of human life, of boyhood resilience, and the capriciousness of fate. Planned for submission in late 2022.
Chantel is represented by Evan Brown.