Katherine Govier's "The Printmaker's Daughter"

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Katherine Govier is the author of nine novels and three short story collections. Her novel Creation, about John James Audubon in Labrador, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2003.

Govier's fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the United Kingdom, the United States, and throughout the Commonwealth, and in translation in Holland, Italy, Turkey, and Slovenia. She is the winner of Canada's Marian Engel Award for a woman writer (1997) and the Toronto Book Award (1992).

Here she shares some ideas for casting a big screen adaptation of her most recent novel, The Printmaker's Daughter:

I would like Margaret Cho to play Oei, the daughter of the great Japanese printmaker, Hokusai. She's divorced, she is not considered beautiful (which, in 19th century Japan, when to be beautiful was a woman's first obligation, was a big problem) and she has a sour demeanor and a sharp tongue.

I know Margaret is not Japanese. She's Korean, and sort of Chinese, as she says on her blog. But she's so perfect to play this woman artist with a surreal imagination who defies all the expectations of women except one-- she's dutiful to her father.

Now who could play Hokusai, that genius trickster, old by 40 and ageless until he dies at 89? Ken Watanabe? Yes, that would be good.

Learn more about the book and author at Katherine Govier's website.

Writers Read: Katherine Govier.

--Marshal Zeringue