In the Garden of Men, an accomplished first novel by John Kupferschmidt, was named winner of the thirtieth Annual 3-Day Contest in 2007.

In 1968, an inconsequential civil servant finds himself swept into the mechanism of state oppression when the Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia. Put to work processing the arrest warrants of anyone who opposes the repressive regime, he falls quickly into the moral no-man's-land of repressive bureaucracy. As his humanity succumbs to the requirements of state doctrine, a series of chance encounters leads him to realize that in the world of men, there are no saints, no ideologies, no proclamations for a perfect salvation, only the fundamental choice: to act or not.

The 3-Day Novel Contest is a put-your-keyboard-where-your-mouth-is rite of passage that has taken place every Labour Day Weekend since 1977. Hundreds of writers enter every year, and thousands more with they had the courage. The contest has spawned its own genre of risky, cutting-edge fiction, evident in the twenty-five unique winning novels that have been published since the contest began.

John Kupferschmidt takes his inspiration from the experience of his parents, who came to Canada as political refugees from the former Czechoslovakia. John studied International Development at McGill University, during which time he worked with Habitat for Humanity and traveled to West Africa to volunteer in a Liberian refugee camp. He was born in Montreal, raised in Oakville, ON, and now lives and writes in Ottawa.

John Kupferschmidt's profile page

...it seems to me that the three-day gauntlet forces instinct to the fore; in the absence of conceptual and rewrite time, the writerly subconscious drives things on. Kupferschmidt's instincts have guided him flawlessly in this tough-minded and deeply moral look at the cost of being good in evil times.
-Jim Bartley of The Globe and Mail

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