Some people have good days. Others, if they’re lucky, have a good month, or a good year. For Thomas Wharton, it’s been a pretty good decade.

In 1995, Wharton’s debut novel “Icefields” won the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Book Festival and drew critical acclaim before going on to capture the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book. His follow-up effort “Salamander” was short-listed for the Governor-General’s Literary Award. Now, his third and most recent novel, “The Logogryph” has made the short-list for the world’s most lucrative literary prize — the IMPAC Dublin award, an honour that provides the winner with more than $100,000 Canadian dollars. In the past 10 years, Wharton has also earned his Ph.D, and added two children to his growing family. He’s been called one of Canada’s most promising young writers and had his work compared in favourable terms to such literary masters as Jorge Luis Borges. 

It’s a long way from the quiet life of a high school student in Jasper, but such is the path that Thomas Wharton has taken since his youth in this small town.

Wharton was born and raised in Grande Prairie  and had turned 15 when his family  moved to Jasper. It was a difficult experience at times, he recalls, but Wharton believes that Jasper provided important inspiration that would later emerge as he began writing.

“It was pretty rough — I had a lot of friends and it was tough to leave them all behind like that,” he says. “Coming to Jasper was fabulous in a way because it was an opportunity to experience wilderness in a way that I never really had before. Being at that really impressionable kind of age it all kind of went really deep.”

Writing was a regular activity for Wharton, even from a very young age. An avid reader, he recalls trying to emulate the authors he admired as a youth.

“One of the things that I loved to do, even when I was a kid, was that if I read something that I liked, then I would try to write something like it,” he said. “So if I was reading animal stories I would try to write some animal stories of my own. I don’t know where it comes from because I’ve got three siblings and none of them really read very much at all, but for some reason it appealed to me.”

By the time he had reached his teenaged years and had moved to Jasper, Wharton’s writing was taking different forms, from longer fiction to poetry. In fact, it’s a poem he wrote for a class assignment in Jasper that he remembers most vividly.

“The teachers there were pretty encouraging with what I was doing but I wrote a poem once for someone who was a substitute English teacher and he didn’t believe that I had written it. It was a backhanded compliment, at least, that’s the way I took it, in that obviously he thinks this is a fairly polished poem,” Wharton says. “In a way that was one of the moments where somebody told me, in an indirect way, that I could be a writer.”

Armed with this burgeoning self-belief and his youthful practice, Wharton began to take creative writing courses as a student at the University of Alberta. In one course, he was taught by Rudy Wiebe, the author of several novels and collections of short fiction. It was in Wiebe’s class that the basis for “Icefields” first emerged onto the written page.

“It really began as a series of short stories,” Wharton recalls. “Each one of these stories was an attempt unto itself to begin a novel... I didn’t know what I wanted to write about and progressively these stories became more and more about Jasper and the icefields.” 

The process of creating the novel was a learning experience in and of itself, Wharton says. It challenged what he had believed to be the “rules” of writing.

“When I started out writing I always thought that to write a novel you had to have a very definite plan and you had to know where you wanted to go,” he says. “For me, it’s necessary to be the book’s first reader and to be surprised along the way, so I don’t generally like to know too much before I get started. I will just start with an image, or something that’s on my mind and so in this case it was the mountains and the ice.”

Jasper, albeit with some artistic licence involved, is the explicit setting for “Icefields”, along with the mountains and valleys leading up to the glacier which plays as important a role in the story as any of the major characters. His subsequent novel was not set in a mountain environment, but Wharton returned to Jasper as a setting for one of the stories in “The Logogryph”.

“It’s a collection of shorter pieces and I needed a frame story that would link them all together, so what I ended up writing was a story set in Jasper about a boy who is given a suitcase full of old books and is thus started on a lifelong love of reading,” he says. “I have an idea cooking in the back of my head about a story set in modern-day Jasper, so I don’t think I’ve said everything I want to say about it.”

This latest book, published in 2004 by Nova Scotia’s Gaspereau Press, has received glowing reviews and, as of last week, the prestigious short-listing for the IMPAC prize. 

“I’m pretty stunned. This book began as a fun sideproject between other books, so to have it go this far internationally is an unexpected treat,” Wharton wrote in a separate e-mail to the Fitzhugh, but during his interview with the paper he admitted that the good press helps to keep him motivated.

“It’s always great to get attention and get reviews and it provides some of the energy that’s needed to keep going with something like writing, especially a long project like a novel,” he says. “One spends such a long time with your own thoughts, so it’s great to get it out there. I don’t try to dwell on it, because when it becomes more about the career rather than the writing then it becomes a distraction from the actual writing.”

Wharton is a creative writing professor at the U of A, and finds it challenging, at times, to schedule in time to write between his professorial obligations and family time. His current project, however, combines two of those essential elements.

Wharton is just putting the finishing touches on a fantasy novel for younger readers.

“It’s something I haven’t tried before,” he said. “It has to do with my kids — they would always ask if they could read my books and I’d say no I don’t think you’re old enough. They wanted me to write something they could read.”  

Now, his 14, 10 and four-year-old are helping their father through the process of writing a novel. 

“It’s been a lot of fun actually because it took me back to the reader that I was when I was a kid,” Wharton says. “I re-read some of my favourite books and asked what was it about these books that drew me in as a reader when I was a kid, to the point where I was practically living in the world that I was reading about?”

His children play an active part in editing the piece and deciding which ideas are worth continuing with.

“They are the best critics,” Wharton says. “They have no problem telling me if something isn’t working, if they saw it already in a movie or read it in a book.”