Praised for her remarkable debut, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, Evelyn Lau continues to mesmerize readers with Fresh Girls and Other Stories, her first collection of short fiction. Written with characteristic intensity and honesty, Lau’s ten stories reveal the lonely underworld of “fresh girls” trapped in prostitution, sadomasochism and domination, searching for a place where sex, obsession and love can meet. In “Pleasure,” a woman finds “strange relief” in being blindfolded and restrained into an enforced helplessness that releases her from all worldly responsibility. The prostitute of “Marriage” asserts herself by toying with the idea of revealing her john’s infidelity. The complexity of her characters is extraordinary and Lau’s prose deftly explores the world where pleasure becomes pain and pain becomes addictive.

Raw, sensitive, and never sentimental, Evelyn Lau shows us a world where turning tricks, donning leather and wielding a whip can become routine -- while love and tenderness seem almost obscene.

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.

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