Henighan studied political science at
Swarthmore College in
Pennsylvania, where he won the Potter Short Story Prize in April 1981. From 1984 to 1992 he lived in
Montreal as a freelance writer and completed an M.A. at
Concordia University. Between 1992 and 1996 he earned a doctorate in Spanish American literature at
Wadham College, Oxford. While at Oxford, Henighan became the first writer to have stories published in three different editions of the annual
May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories. He also studied in
Colombia,
Romania and Germany. From 1996 to 1998 Henighan taught Latin American literature at
Queen Mary & Westfield College,
University of London. Since 1999 he has taught at the
University of Guelph, Ontario. Henighan has published six novels. His novels describe cultural conflict in inter-American or trans-Atlantic contexts.
The Places Where Names Vanish (1998) follows a young woman from her village in Ecuador to immigrant life in Montreal.
The Streets of Winter (2004) shuttles between characters of different linguistic, religious, ethnic and cultural backgrounds as they are drawn into the struggle for control of a crumbling Montreal apartment building.
The Path of the Jaguar (2016), narrated from the point-of-view of a young Indigenous
Maya woman, was praised for its depiction of Mayan life and was translated into Spanish. The narrator of
Mr Singh Among the Fugitives (2017), a satire on the Canadian literary scene, is a
Sikh immigrant to
Canada who becomes a minor celebrity by contributing
diversity to literary gatherings. In Henighan's most ambitious novel,
The World of After (2021), three male Oxford graduate students, two of them Canadian, respond to a shattered triangular friendship by pursuing divergent fates in eastern Europe in the aftermath of the fall of the
Berlin Wall. Henighan's short stories have been published in Canada, the U.S., Great Britain and, in translation, in Europe, in journals such as
Ploughshares,
Lettre Internationale,
The Malahat Review,
The Fiddlehead., ''
Queen's Quarterly, Prairie Fire''. Henighan's stories feature immigrants, travellers and other displaced people caught between cultures. According to the journal
Canadian Literature, Henighan is "a writer who looks hard at the complexities and rebarbative elements of the multicultural, globalized world we live in." Henighan's journalism has appeared in
The Times Literary Supplement,
The Walrus, '
The Globe and Mail,
Toronto Life,
Adbusters and the
Montreal Gazette. From 2003 to 2023 Henighan wrote a column on Canadian and international culture in
Geist. He has been a finalist for the
Governor General's Award, and the Canada Prize in the Humanities. In 2006 Henighan set off a controversy when he attacked the
Giller Prize. As an academic, he has published articles on
Latin American literature and Lusophone African fiction, a book on the
Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan novelist
Miguel Ángel Asturias and a 776-page study of the analysis of the history of
Nicaragua presented in the work of
Ernesto Cardenal and
Sergio Ramírez. Henighan has published translations from Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian, including Angolan writer
Ondjaki, Cabo Verdean writer
Germano Almeida, Nicaraguan poet
Carlos Rigby, and the interwar Romanian writers
Mihail Sebastian. and Jean Bart (born
Eugeniu Botez). From 2007 to 2024 Henighan was general editor of a translation series run by
Biblioasis, a literary publisher based in
Windsor, Ontario. Writers recruited by Henighan for the Biblioasis International Translation Series include
Horacio Castellanos Moya,
Mia Couto,
Pepetela,
Thomas Melle, Liliana Heker and
Emili Teixidor. As a translator, Henighan has twice been a longlist finalist for the
Best Translated Book Award, and once for the
International Dublin Literary Award. ==Bibliography==