You Are Not Who You Claim

Evelyn Lau

mar 1994 · Dundurn

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At eighteen, Evelyn Lau published a journal of her life on ""the streets"" and her experiences with drugs and prostitution. Runaway was a chronicle of harsh survival, pain, and an obsession with writing which helped provide an escape from the deadness of the street. For her, poetry was the voice of the hope and the disillusionment that she felt as she passed from the innocence of a young girl down through the confusing hell of the street and into the often harsher realities of the ""straight"" world. Strong, intimate, disturbing and finally poignant, Evelyn Lau's poems are really about people, trapped and hurting behind their many masks of conformity.

""Evelyn Lau is the poet I've been waiting for . . . . She has the experience and street-learned savvy to see the cruel hoax that idiots and hypocrites call civilization. Her lines and images are compellingly fresh. Her observations are free of literary jargon. If early success doesn't weaken her rage, doesn't soften her indictments, her future success is inevitable.""
- Irving Layton

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Evelyn Lau has been publishing poetry and prose since she was thirteen. Now eighteen, she has her poetry appear in Prism International, Queen's Quarterly and Canadian Author and Bookman, among other literary magazines. Her prose has been published in MacLean's, Vancouver Magazine and The Antigonish Review. And she has won six awards for her poetry.

For two years, Evelyn lived on ""the streets"" in a world of drugs and prostitution recording these experiences in a journal. She left the streets in 1988 at the age of seventeen and extracts from this journal became the best-selling Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, which stayed on bestseller lists across Canada for months.

Evelyn is now a freelance writer for the Province and the Globe and Mail as well as working on a collection of short stories. She lives in Vancouver.