Will Aitken

{{short description|American-Canadian writer}}

Will Aitken is an American-Canadian novelist, journalist and film critic.Richard Burnett, [http://www.xtra.ca/public/National/Montreal_author_Will_Aitken_revives_Death_in_Venice-11432.aspx "Montreal author Will Aitken revives Death in Venice"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120615092650/http://www.xtra.ca/public/National/Montreal_author_Will_Aitken_revives_Death_in_Venice-11432.aspx |date=2012-06-15 }}. Xtra!, January 26, 2012.W. H. New, Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. University of Toronto Press, 2002. {{ISBN|0802007619}}. Chapter "Gay and Lesbian Writing", pp. 418-422. Originally from Terre Haute, Indiana, he has been based in Montreal, Quebec since moving to that city to attend McGill University in 1972.

In Montreal, he was a cofounder of the city's first LGBT bookstore, Librairie L'Androgyne, in 1973. He has also worked as an arts journalist and film critic for a variety of media outlets,[http://contests.eyeweekly.com/eye/issue/issue_09.21.00/arts/books.php "Aitken goes big on Japan"]. Eye Weekly, September 21, 2000. including the CBC, the BBC, National Public Radio, The Globe and Mail, Maclean's, The Paris Review, Christopher Street and the National Post.

He published his first novel, Terre Haute, in 1989.Gregory Woods, A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition. Yale University Press, 1999. {{ISBN|9780300080889}}. He has since published three further novels.

He taught film studies at Dawson College in Montreal. In 2011, he published Death in Venice: A Queer Film Classic, a critical analysis of Luchino Visconti's 1971 film Death in Venice, as part of Arsenal Pulp Press's Queer Film Classics series.

His 2018 book, Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo Van Hove and the Art of Resistance, was published by University of Regina Press. The book was a shortlisted finalist for the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.[https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-writers-trust-short-lists-reveal-familiar-faces/ "Writers' Trust short lists reveal familiar faces"]. The Globe and Mail, September 26, 2018.