Writers Festival Radio: Recent Episodes
Ottawa International Writers Festival
About the Writers Festival The imagination is our most valuable renewable resource. So, twice a year we convene an international celebration of ideas to recharge our imaginations. From politics to poetry, science to music, history to thrillers, we celebrate the full diversity of the word and the gifted writers who guide us in our exploration of the world. Our year-round special events keep the ideas coming between Festivals.
We believe that a love of reading and learning should be nurtured throughout our lives and that literacy is a birthright. Whether offering writing workshops to the homeless, hosting a Nobel Laureate, organizing our biannual literary celebrations or bringing authors into area schools, our goal is the same: to create an environment that activates creativity and encourages the love of reading, learning and self-expression.
Writers Festival Radio is pleased to present this conversation between Stephen Brockwell and rob mclennan.
Writers Festival Radio is pleased to present this conversation between Lucy van Oldenbarneveld and Kelly S. Thompson
Writers Festival Radio is pleased to present this conversation between Manahil Bandukwala and Anuja Varghese.
Writers Festival Radio is pleased to present this conversation between Steven W. Beattie and Amy Jones.
Writers Festival Radio is pleased to present this conversation between Rick Mofina and Linwood Barclay.
Writers Festival Radio is pleased to present this conversation between Lisa Moore and William Ping.
Writers Festival Radio is pleased to present this conversation between Steven W. Beattie and Zoe Whittall about her acclaimed novel The Fake.
The final podcast of our 6-Part series on Teaching in the Anthropocene. Hosted by Neil Wilson.This new critical volume presents various perspectives on teaching and teacher education in the face of the global climate crisis, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Teaching in the Anthropocene calls for a reorientation of the aims of teaching so that we might imagine multiple futures in which children, youths, and families can thrive amid a myriad of challenges related to the earth’s decreasing habitability.Jenalee Kluttz, Ph.D. An educator-activist and community organizer, Jenalee is passionate about climate and ecological justice. She brings this passion into her work at the University of British Columbia where she researches social movements for climate and environmental justice, the learning that takes place in and through social action, as well as education for sustainability more broadly. At the center of her work is the recognition that she lives as a settler on lands that are the traditional, unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh, and thus much of her research and writing focuses on decolonizing climate action.
Part 5 of our 6- part series on Teaching in the Anthropocene. Hosted by Neil Wilson.This new critical volume presents various perspectives on teaching and teacher education in the face of the global climate crisis, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Teaching in the Anthropocene calls for a reorientation of the aims of teaching so that we might imagine multiple futures in which children, youths, and families can thrive amid a myriad of challenges related to the earth’s decreasing habitability.Dr. Michelle Lam is the Director of the Centre for Aboriginal and Rural Education Studies (CARES), an applied research institute in the Faculty of Education at Brandon University. Prior to entering academia, she was an English as an Additional Language teacher in Canada and abroad. She is interested in newcomer settlement, education for anti-racism, and rural equity.
Part 4 of our 6-Part series; Teaching in the Anthropocene. Hosted by Neil Wilson.This new critical volume presents various perspectives on teaching and teacher education in the face of the global climate crisis, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Teaching in the Anthropocene calls for a reorientation of the aims of teaching so that we might imagine multiple futures in which children, youths, and families can thrive amid a myriad of challenges related to the earth’s decreasing habitability.Dr. Candy Jones is currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education and Chair of the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at Brandon University. Her research interests include rural education and capacity building, teacher professional development (particularly in rural contexts), mathematics education, and teacher identity. A career-long teacher and scholar in the field of rural education, Dr. Jones spent 20 years as secondary educator in three different rural Manitoba communities before moving to Brandon University in 2015. She is both passionate about the strength and beauty of rural spaces, and a staunch advocate for those who live and work within them.
Part 3 of our 6-Part series on Teaching in the Anthropocene. Hosted by Neil Wilson.This new critical volume presents various perspectives on teaching and teacher education in the face of the global climate crisis, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Teaching in the Anthropocene calls for a reorientation of the aims of teaching so that we might imagine multiple futures in which children, youths, and families can thrive amid a myriad of challenges related to the earth’s decreasing habitability.Maria Vamvalis is currently a doctoral candidate in the Curriculum and Pedagogy program in the department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Her research focuses on climate justice education that nurtures meaning, purpose and hope in learners. She has been an educator in the public school system in Ontario and has worked for many years as a facilitator of teacher professional learning and as a curriculum consultant. She has participated in diverse educational projects and has been deeply committed to reflexive practices within education. She is currently an instructor in the Master of Teaching program at OISE, University of Toronto.
Part 2 of our 6-Part series on Teaching in the Anthropocene. Hosted by Neil Wilson.This new critical volume presents various perspectives on teaching and teacher education in the face of the global climate crisis, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Teaching in the Anthropocene calls for a reorientation of the aims of teaching so that we might imagine multiple futures in which children, youths, and families can thrive amid a myriad of challenges related to the earth’s decreasing habitability.Dr. Alysha Farrell is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Brandon University. She is passionate about fostering a caring ecology in the study of education. Her research focuses on teaching, leading, and learning in the face of the climate crisis. Using arts-based methods like playwriting, forum theatre, narrative photography, and poetic inquiry, she collaborates with others to tell stories that will stick to your bones. Her recent research-art exhibition at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba was called Before I Go to Bed Tonight. The exhibition featured the work of 17 young artists who delved into the personal and collective impacts of climate change. Alysha is the author of two books, Exploring the Affective Dimensions of Educational Leadership (2020) and Ecosophy and Educational Research for the Anthropocene (2022). She co-edited a third book called, Teaching in the Anthropocene: Education in the Face of Environmental Crisis that was released in July 2022. She has presented at several national and international conferences on topics such as using arts-based approaches to better understand the emotional dimensions of climate change education and eco-orientations to pedagogy.
Part 1 of our 6-Part Series on Teaching in the Anthropocene. Hosted by Neil Wilson.This new critical volume presents various perspectives on teaching and teacher education in the face of the global climate crisis, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Teaching in the Anthropocene calls for a reorientation of the aims of teaching so that we might imagine multiple futures in which children, youths, and families can thrive amid a myriad of challenges related to the earth’s decreasing habitability.Stan Wilson has a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara and is an Elder of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation. Stan has experience teaching at all levels of education including primary, elementary, and high school both in the public system and at the First Nation’s level. He has been a school board member, a member of the Board of Regents for the University of Winnipeg, a school principal, superintendent of education, consultant to provincial Departments of Education in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and a dean of Education for the University College of the North. Stan is a co-founder of the First Nations Graduate Education Program at the University of Alberta and is now working with a team of international Indigenous scholars to develop an international doctoral program.
Steven W, Beattie sits down with renowned author and journalist John Lorinc to discuss his Balsillie Prize-winning book Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias.Is the ‘smart city’ the utopia we’ve been waiting for? The promise of the so-called smart city has been at the forefront of urban planning and development since the early 2010s, and the tech industry that supplies smart city software and hardware is now worth hundreds of billions a year.But the ideas and approaches underpinning smart city tech raise tough and important questions about the future of urban communities, surveillance, automation, and public participation. The smart city era, moreover, belongs firmly in a longer historical narrative about cities ? one defined by utopian ideologies, architectural visions, and technological fantasies.Smart streetlights, water and air quality tracking, autonomous vehicles: with examples from all over the world, including New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Portland, and Chicago, Dream States unpacks the world of smart city tech, but also situates this important shift in city-building into a broader story about why we still dream about perfect places.The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.SUBSCRIBE:https://writersfestival.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=8c60faf808d54738144cc85de&id=d2443cdbd3DONATIONS:https://writersfestival.org/about/donations
Join us for a conversation between poet and editor Ellen Chang-Richardson and writer and visual artist Manahil Bandukwala about her poetry collection, MONUMENT .MONUMENT is a conversation with Mughal Empress Mumtaz Mahal, which moves her legacy beyond the Taj Mahal.MONUMENT upturns notions of love, monumentalisation, and empire by exploring buried facets of Mumtaz Mahal's story. The collection layers linear time and geographical space to chart the continuing presence of historical legacies. It considers what alternate futures could have been possible. Who are we when we continue to make the same mistakes? Beyond distance, time, and boundaries, what do we still carry?The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.SUBSCRIBE:https://writersfestival.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=8c60faf808d54738144cc85de&id=d2443cdbd3DONATIONS:https://writersfestival.org/about/donations
CBC’s Laurence Wall leads the conversation with Canada’s top war historian, Tim Cook, about his latest publication, Lifesavers and Body Snatchers: Medical Care and the Struggle for Survival in the Great War . Lifesavers and Body Snatchers is a definitive medical history of the Great War, illuminating how the carnage of modern battle gave birth to revolutionary life-saving innovations. It brings to light shocking revelations of the ways the brutality of combat and the necessity of agonizing battlefield decisions led to unimaginable strain for men and women of medicine who fought to save the lives of soldiers. Medical care in almost all armies during the Great War, and especially in the Canadian medical services, was sophisticated and constantly evolving. Vastly more wounded soldiers were saved than lost. Doctors and surgeons prevented disease from decimating armies, confronted ghastly wounds from chemical weap-ons, remade shattered bodies, and struggled to ease soldiers’ battle-haunted minds. After the war, the hard lessons learned by doctors and nurses were brought back to Canada. A new Department of Health created guidelines in the aftermath of the 1918–1919 influ-enza pandemic, which had killed 55,000 Canadians and millions around the world. In a grim irony, the fight to improve civilian health was furthered by the most destructive war up to that point in human history. But medical advances were not the only thing brought back from Europe: Lifesavers and Body Snatchers exposes the disturbing story of the harvesting of human body parts in medical units behind the lines. Tim Cook has spent over a decade investigating the history of Canadian medical doctors removing the body parts of slain soldiers and transporting their brains, lungs, bones, and other organs to the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) in London, England. This uncovered history has never been told before and is part of the hidden legacy of the medical war.The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.SUBSCRIBE:https://writersfestival.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=8c60faf808d54738144cc85de&id=d2443cdbd3DONATIONS:https://writersfestival.org/about/donations
CKCU’s Susan Johnston sits down with Ottawa’s Michelle Sinclair about her acclaimed debut novel, Almost Visible . Exploring cultural and personal memory, it reflects on what can happen when a lonely person intervenes in another person's life. Tess has just moved to Montreal from Nova Scotia, and seeks to lose herself by involving herself in the lives of others. She befriends an older man while delivering meals to the elderly. Her interest in his past veers into obsession after furtively going through his photos and letters and "borrowing" his journal.Though fact and fiction are blurred, they reveal a man shaken by political polarization and repression in his Latin-American homeland. Tess learns about a young, passionate man in the 1970s forced to reconcile his love for a militant young woman and his dedication to his best friend whose family is on the other side of the political divide. As she delves deeper into Mr. the man’s story, she questions her own life choices, emotions and obsessions. The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.SUBSCRIBE:https://writersfestival.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=8c60faf808d54738144cc85de&id=d2443cdbd3DONATIONS:https://writersfestival.org/about/donations
Steven W. Beattie interviews Elyse Friedman, acclaimed author, screenwriter, poet and playwright. Her latest novel, The Opportunist is a sly, compulsively readable tale about greed, power and the world’s most devious family. When Alana Shropshire’s seventy-six-year-old father, Ed, starts dating Kelly, a saucy twenty-eight-year-old, a flurry of messages arrive from Alana’s brothers, urging her to help “protect Dad” from the young interloper. Alana knows that what Teddy and Martin really want to protect is their father’s fortune, and she tells them she couldn’t care less about the May–December romance. Long estranged from her privileged family, Alana has no stake in the game, and as a hardworking single mom, she has more important things to worry about. But when Ed and Kelly’s wedding is announced, Teddy and Martin kick into hyperdrive, and eventually persuade Alana to fly to their father’s 900-acre West Coast island retreat to perform one small task in their plan to lure the “gold digger” away from their father. Kelly, however, proves a lot wilier than expected, and Alana becomes entangled in an increasingly dangerous scheme full of secrets and surprises. Will she be able to escape her brothers’ elaborate web of deceit? Just how far will her siblings go to retain control?The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.SUBSCRIBE:https://writersfestival.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=8c60faf808d54738144cc85de&id=d2443cdbd3DONATIONS:https://writersfestival.org/about/donations
The Festival’s Neil Wilson sits down with Geoff Dembicki, an investigative climate change reporter to discuss his acclaimed book, The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change, published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute. Burning fossil fuels will cause catastrophic global warming: this is what top American oil executives were told by scientists in 1959. But they ignored that warning. Instead, they developed one of the biggest, most polluting oil sources in the world—the oil sands in Alberta, Canada. In The Petroleum Papers, Dembicki draws from confidential oil industry documents to uncover for the first time how companies like Exxon, Koch Industries, and Shell built a global right-wing echo chamber to protect oil sands profits—a misinformation campaign that continues to this day. He also tells the high-stakes stories of people fighting back: a Seattle lawyer who brought down Big Tobacco and is now going after Big Oil, a Filipina activist whose family drowned in a climate disaster, and a former Exxon engineer pushed out for asking hard questions. With experts now warning we have less than a decade to get global emissions under control, The Petroleum Papers provides a step-by-step account of how we got to this precipice—and the politicians and companies who deserve our blame.The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.SUBSCRIBE:https://writersfestival.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=8c60faf808d54738144cc85de&id=d2443cdbd3DONATIONS:https://writersfestival.org/about/donations
Steven W. Beattie hosts a conversation with consummate storyteller and bestselling novelist Wayne Johnston. His latest, Jennie's Boy, reaches back into his past to bring us a sad, tender and at times extremely funny memoir of his Newfoundland boyhood.
"Wayne Johnston’s childhood in Newfoundland was full of laughter, pain and poverty. And then laughter again. His memoir, Jennie’s Boy, is an uplifting account of a childhood not just survived—he came close to death too many times to count—but triumphed over. Thank god he lived to tell the tale." — Rick Mercer
For six months between 1966 and 1967, Wayne Johnston and his family lived in a wreck of a house across from his grandparents in Goulds, Newfoundland. At seven, Wayne was sickly and skinny, unable to keep food down, plagued with insomnia and a relentless cough that no doctor could diagnose, though they had already removed his tonsils, adenoids and appendix. To the neighbours, he was known as “Jennie’s boy,” a backhanded salute to his tiny, ferocious mother, who felt judged for Wayne’s condition at the same time as worried he might never grow up.
Jennie’s Boy is Wayne’s tribute to a family and a community that were simultaneously fiercely protective of him and fed up with having to make allowances for him. His boyhood was full of pain, yes, but also tenderness and Newfoundland wit. By that wit, and through love—often expressed in the most unloving ways—Wayne survived.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Peter Schneider speaks with author, journalist and publisher Michael Hingston about his remarkable book, Try Not to Be Strange: The Curious History of the Kingdom of Redonda. It tells, for the first time, the complete history of Redonda’s transformation from an uninhabited, guano-encrusted island into a fantastical and international kingdom of writers.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
SUBSCRIBE: https://writersfestival.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=8c60faf808d54738144cc85de&id=d2443cdbd3
MAKE A DONATION: https://writersfestival.org/about/donations
We present the the third and final of our special episodes hosted by York University’s Zulfikar Hirji and presented in collaboration with Carleton University’s Beyond Resettlement Conference. (https://carleton.ca/uganda-collection/beyond-resettlement/)
Born in Uganda, Tina Athaide immigrated with her family to Canada from England and has been a teacher for thirty years. Her debut novel, Orange for the Sunsets. The Middle Grade book is a Junior Library Guild Selection and winner of the CCBC Geoffrey Bilson award for historical fiction for young readers.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Subscribe: https://writersfestival.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=8c60faf808d54738144cc85de&id=d2443cdbd3
Donations: https://writersfestival.org/about/donations
We present the second of three special episodes hosted by York University’s Zulfikar Hirji and presented in collaboration with Carleton University’s Beyond Resettlement Conference. (https://carleton.ca/uganda-collection/beyond-resettlement/)
Tasneem Jamal was born in Mbarara, Uganda, and immigrated to Canada with her family in 1975. The author of the novel Where the Air Is Sweet, she serves as a nonfiction editor at The New Quarterly and is at work on her second novel.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Subscribe: https://writersfestival.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=8c60faf808d54738144cc85de&id=d2443cdbd3
Donation: https://writersfestival.org/about/donations
We present the first of three special episodes hosted by York University’s Zulfikar Hirji and presented in collaboration with Carleton University’s Beyond Resettlement Conference. (https://carleton.ca/uganda-collection/beyond-resettlement/)
Hafsa Zayyan is half-Nigerian, half-Pakistani and was born and raised (mostly) in the UK. She is a dispute resolution lawyer working in the City of London and is also the author of We Are All Birds of Uganda, the winner of MerkyBooks’ inaugural New Writer’s Prize and short-listed for the Goldsboro Glass Bell Award.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
https://writersfestival.us5.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=8c60faf808d54738144cc85de&id=d2443cdbd3
https://writersfestival.org/about/donations
This conversation between CBC's Amanda Pfeffer and Dr. Gabor Maté was recorded at a live event on October 1, 2022.
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture is a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing.
Gabor Maté’s internationally bestselling books have changed the way we look at addiction and have been integral in shifting the conversations around ADHD, stress, disease, embodied trauma, and parenting. Now, in this revolutionary book, he eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their health care systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health?
For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. In The Myth of Normal, co-written with his son Daniel, Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society, and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Poet Ellen Chang-Richardson reunites with David Ly for a conversation on his second collection Dream of Me as Water, which explores ways of being that are not beholden to the expectations of others.
Using water as his central metaphor, Ly meditates on how identity is never a stagnant concept, but instead something that is intangible, fluid, and ever-evolving. Dream of Me as Water revels in the nuances of the self, flouting outside perceptions for deeper, more personal realities.
Kate Heartfield sits down with acclaimed bestseller Emma Donoghue to discuss her latest move, Haven.
Around the year 600, three men vow to leave the world behind and set out in a small boat for an island their leader has seen in a dream, with only faith to guide them.
In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar priest named Artt has a dream in which God tells him to leave the sinful world behind. With two monks—young Trian and old Cormac—he rows down the River Shannon in search of an isolated spot in which to found a monastery. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find the impossibly steep, bare island known today as Skellig Michael. In such a place, what will survival mean?
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Sean Wilson sits down with Rich Larson to talk about his acclaimed second novel, Ymir, a gripping, far-future thriller.
"Larson is a writer who can do just about anything, and in his second novel he splices Iain M. Banks with Alastair Reynolds…This is brain-busting sci-fi for the hardcore crowd." — Nick Wolven Yorick never wanted to see his homeworld again. He left Ymir two decades ago, with half his face blown off and no love lost for the place. But when his employer's mines are threatened by a vicious alien machine, Yorick is shipped back home to hunt it.
All he wants is to do his job and get out. Instead, Yorick is pulled into a revolution brewing beneath Ymir's frozen surface, led by the very last person he wanted to see again—the brother who sent him off in pieces twenty years ago.
Author and poet Rhonda Douglas hosts a conversation with Helen Humphreys, winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Fiction and the Toronto Book Award, about her latest publication, And a Dog Called Fig: Solitude, Connection, the Writing Life .
An artist’s solitude is a sacred space, one to be guarded and kept apart from the chaos of the world. This isolation allows for uninhibited wandering, uninterrupted meditation and the nurturing of sparks of inspiration into fires of creation. But in the artist’s quiet there is also loneliness, self-doubt, the possibility of collapsing too far inward.
What an artist needs is a familiar, a creature perfectly suited to accompany them on this coveted, difficult journey. They need a companion with emotional intelligence, innate curiosity, passion and energy and an enthusiasm for the world beyond, but also the capacity to sleep contentedly for many hours. What an artist needs, Helen Humphreys would say, is a dog.
And a Dog Called Fig is a memoir of the writing life told through the dogs Humphreys has lived with and loved over a lifetime, culminating with the recent arrival and settling in of Fig, a Vizsla puppy. Interspersed are stories of other writers and their irreplaceable companions: Virginia Woolf and Grizzle, Gertrude Stein and Basket, Thomas Hardy and Wessex—the dog who walked the dining table at dinner parties, taking whatever he liked—and many more.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Don’t miss this conversation between CKCU’s Susan Johnston and award-winning screenwriter and director Katie Tallo about her latest novel, Poison Lilies.
In this follow-up to the international bestseller Dark August, Gus Monet becomes dangerously entangled with a powerful family whose wealth and success are built on dark and deadly secrets.
After moving back to her hometown and solving her mother's murder, Augusta (Gus) Monet thought she was finally settled. Content for the first time in her life. Done with digging into the past.
But it’s not to be. Cue hard reset number whatever.
When Gus makes a mistake she can’t undo, she does the only thing she can: cuts and runs. Packs all her things in the dead of night and takes off. Gus lands at The Ambassador Court, an art-deco apartment building with cheap rent in one of Ottawa’s oldest neighborhoods where no one knows her. The perfect place for a fresh start—or at least a good place to hide.
She soon meets Poppy Honeywell, her reclusive elderly neighbor who wanders about in a pink kimono like an aging Hollywood starlet and who happens to be a descendant of the Mutchmores, one of the city's founding families. When a body emerges from an icy pond in a nearby park, Gus’s growing curiosity with Poppy and her influential family suddenly takes a perilous turn with deadly consequences.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Join us for a conversation between Sean Wilson and Dr. Keith Seifert, author of The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi: Exploring the Microscopic World in Our Forests, Homes, and Bodies.
In this illuminating book, esteemed mycologist Keith Seifert reveals the important role that microscopic fungi, including yeasts, molds, and slimes, play in our lives, all while remaining invisible to the naked eye.
Despite their many benefits, we hold a precarious relationship with fungi: fungal diseases lead to over 1 million deaths each year, and they have played a destructive role in disasters ranging from the Irish Potato Famine to possibly even the extinction of the dinosaurs.
The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi urges us to better understand our relationship with fungi-and to plan our future with them in mind-while revealing their world in all its beautiful complexity.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Join us for a conversation between poets nina jane drystek and Conyer Clayton winner of the Ottawa Book Award.
But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves, Conyer Clayton's follow-up to her award-winning debut, We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite, is a collection of prose poems that employs surrealism, humour, and body horror to cope with CPTSD, assault, loss, fear, and the memories of it all. The narrator weaves her way through largely aquatic landscapes-water parks, ponds, beast-filled lakes, vast oceans. She walks through time, reverting to childhood and back within a few lines, has the sureness of knowledge that exists only in dreamscapes, and foreshadows the inevitable with a calm derived from accepting the absurd. These poems, hallucinatory and unexpected, are threaded by repetition: Here is another car accident. Here is another man to flee from. Here is questioned memory. Here is the site of grief, revisited, and sometimes, within it, tentatively, hope. In these poems, Clayton explores how we question the validity of our own memories, especially those related to abuse and assault, and the way we forget-or obsess over potentially forgetting-memories of those who've died. These poems validate dreams, by proxy, and all internal experience as authentic and valid experience that carries wisdom even when we don't know it.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Peter Schneider interviews Naben Ruthnam about his novel, A Hero of Our Time, a vicious takedown of superficial diversity initiatives and tech culture, with a beating heart of broken sincerity.
Osman Shah is a pitstop on his white colleague Olivia Robinson’s quest for corporate domination at AAP, an edutech startup determined to automate higher education. Osman, obsessed by Olivia’s ability to successfully disguise ambition and self-interest as collectivist diversity politics, is bent on exposing her. Aided by his colleague turned comrade-in-arms Nena, who loathes and tolerates him in equal measure, Osman delves into Olivia's twisted past. But at every turn, he's stymied by his unfailing gift for cruel observation, which he turns with most ferocity on himself, without ever noticing what it is that stops him from connecting to anyone in his past or present. As Osman loses his grip on his family, Nena, and everything he thought was essential to his identity, he confronts an enemy who may simply be too good at her job to be defeated.
A Hero of Our Time cracks the veneer of well-intentioned race conversations in the West, dismantles cheery narratives of progress through tech and “streamlined” education, and exposes the venomous self-congratulation and devouring lust for wealth, power, and property that lurks beneath.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Author and editor Stuart Ross sits down with ReLit Award Winner Michael Blouin to talk about his new novel, I Am Billy the Kid , which imagines the life of the infamous gun fighter after he fakes his own death and heads to Canada in the company of his older brother Joseph.
History tells us that the short and violent life of William Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, ended at the hand of Pat Garrett on the moonless night of July 14, 1881. But I Am Billy the Kid tells a different story, straight from Billy himself.
This revisionist history seen through the lens of a twenty-first century sensibility features the picaresque hero we thought we knew and the unexpected one that we don't; a fearless and determined young woman who is in no mood to be saved and would much prefer exacting her own revenge.
Billy has been in an alcoholic haze since a failed attempt to escape notoriety by faking his own death. By 1915, his fame has only increased, and when word of a possible ruse leaks out, Billy finds himself once again on the run.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Don Butler interviews Ottawa’s Kate Heartfield about her international bestseller, The Embroidered Book , a novel of revolution, magic, and royal romance.
“Power is not something you are given. Power is something you take. When you are a woman, it is a little more difficult, that’s all.”
- Charlotte, daughter of the Habsburg Empress, arrives in Naples to marry a man she has never met. Her sister Antoine is sent to France, and in the mirrored corridors of Versailles they rename her Marie Antoinette.
The sisters are alone, but they are not powerless. When they were only children, they discovered a book of spells – spells that work, with dark and unpredictable consequences.
In a time of vicious court politics, of discovery and dizzying change, they use the book to take control of their lives. But every spell requires a sacrifice. And as love between the sisters turns to rivalry, they will send Europe spiralling into revolution.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Steven W. Beattie hosts a conversation with Giller Prize nominee Sharon English about Night in the World , a tender ensemble novel about coming home to oneself and one's family through the beauty and soulfulness of Earth, even in an age of unravelling.
Brothers Justin and Oliver have never been close. Justin owns an iconic Toronto restaurant and lives with his wife and daughter in Baby Point. Oliver, a former environmental reporter, does admin for a local gym and rents an attic apartment. Yet both men know their worlds stand on the brink. With their mother's abrupt death, each sets out to set things right: Oliver to reclaim a beloved home, Justin to save one that's falling apart.
Intersecting Justin's and Oliver's journeys is Gabe: a budding biologist enchanted by the underappreciated beauty of moths, and conflicted by the demands of scientific scrutiny. As the brothers' pursuits take them from Toronto Island to the Humber River, from drugs and transgressive art to meetings with imperiled activists, Gabe stakes everything on a glimpse of a new possibility.
Sharon English has penned a tender and powerful novel about the claims places make on our hearts, and how journeys into darkness are sometimes necessary to see through catastrophe. Night in the World explores the need to end our separations from each other and from nature -- coming home, at last, to a beleaguered yet still beautiful world.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
"Poguemahone is like a high dive: The toughest part of reading it might be convincing your feet to leave the board. Once you’ve done that, gravity does the rest." —New York Times
The Festival’s Neil Wilson sits down with Patrick McCabe for a conversation about his latest, Poguemahone , an epic reinvention of the verse novel that combines Modernist fragmentation and Beat spontaneity with Irish folklore, then douses it in whiskey and sets it on fire.
Poguemahone is a swirling, psychedelic, bleakly funny fugue by the Booker-shortlisted author of The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto.
Una Fogarty, suffering from dementia in a seaside nursing home, would be all alone without her brother Dan, whose epic free-verse monologue tells their family story. Exile from Ireland and immigrant life in England. Their mother’s trials as a call girl. Young Una’s search for love in a seemingly haunted hippie squat, and the two-timing Scottish stoner poet she’ll never get over. Now she sits outside in the sun as her memories unspool from Dan’s mouth and his own role in the tale grows ever stranger— and more sinister.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Join Stephen Brockwell for a conversation with author, poet and editor Stuart Ross about his latest publication, The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, a poignant meditation on mortality.
A writer friend once pointed out that whenever Stuart Ross got close to something heavy and “real” in a poem, a hamburger would inevitably appear for comic relief. In this hybrid essay/memoir/poetic meditation, Ross shoves aside the heaping plate of burgers to wrestle with what it means to grieve the people one loves and what it means to go on living in the face of an enormous accumulation of loss.
Written during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, shortly after the sudden death of his brother left him the last living member of his family and as a catastrophic diagnosis meant anticipating the death of his closest friend, this meditation on mortality ? a kind of literary shiva ? is Ross’s most personal book to date.
More than a catalogue of losses, The Book of Grief and Hamburgers is a moving act of resistance against self-annihilation and a desperate attempt to embrace all that was good in his relationships with those most dear to him.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Join us for a conversation between the Festival’s Neil Wilson and acclaimed author Mary-Lou Zeitoun about her latest young adult novel, Jamilah at the End of the World .
Set against the backdrop of a brutal Toronto summer heatwave, seventeen-year-old Jamilah Monsour makes plans for what she’s certain is the beginning of the climate change catastrophe that will end the world. Luckily, Jamilah knows what has to be done to save her family: transform the back alley garage into a bunker. Reluctantly her parents allow the bunker, but they draw the line when she announces she’s going to skip university and instead use the money they had saved for her education to buy solar panels and a generator.
When an electricity blackout strikes, Jamilah’s climate change anxiety kicks into high gear and she ends up staying out all night, infuriating her father who is done with all this doomsday nonsense. Tension at home erupts and Jamilah runs away and joins a climate change protest where she learns about solidarity and agency, giving her hope for the future. When she returns home, her parents see just how deep Jamilah’s climate change convictions run and the family discusses her attending university to study environmental science, a plan they can all agree on. But Jamilah still plans on buying a generator, just in case.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Weaving together the lives of three women, Looking for Jane is an unforgettable debut about the devastating consequences that come from a lack of choice - and the enduring power of a mother’s love. Don’t miss this conversation between Janet Somerville and Heather Marshall.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
CKCU’s Susan Johnston sits down with Mark Frutkin, the Trillium Book Award-wining author of Fabrizio's Return about his latest historical novel, The Artist and the Assassin .
The play of light and shadow defines Mark Frutkin's vibrant narrative based on the life of the seventeenth-century painter known as Caravaggio, whose revolutionary use of the chiaroscuro technique fuelled his dazzling success while his demons led him down the path of exile and, ultimately, assassination.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Sean Wilson sits down with Katie Kitamura, whose latest acclaimed bestseller, Intimacies, was one of the best reviews novels of 2021. It was a New York Times TOP 10 Book, Longlisted for the National Book Award and a “best book of the year” from Washington Post, Vogue, Time, Oprah Daily, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlantic, Kirkus and Entertainment Weekly.
An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home.
She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s asked to interpret for a former president accused of war crimes.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Poet and playwright David O’Meara sits down with City of Ottawa Book Award finalist Jean Van Loon to discuss her latest collection, Nuclear Family.
Jean Van Loon’s father was a metallurgist in an Ottawa lab that contributed to the Manhattan Project. The Geiger counter he brought home exposed her mother’s dinner plate as radioactive. Her childhood friend’s father sold cobalt bombs to the Soviet Union. Unbeknownst even to the family, her mother worked for Canada’s Cold War intelligence service.
Rooted in memory and history, Nuclear Family carries the reader into the sense of impending nuclear doom and the explosions of material wealth that shaped Van Loon’s childhood. Poems come alive with image, sound, and texture, portraying the innocence of childhood games, the worldwide effects of prolonged nuclear testing, and the long-lasting legacy of her father’s suicide – a fallout of radioactive silences.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Acclaimed critic Steven W. Beattie sits down with Giller Prize finalist Alexander MacLeod to discuss Animal Person , his new story collection about the needs, temptations, and tensions that exist just beneath the surface of our lives. Named a Canadian Fiction title to watch by the CBC, Quill & Quire, and 49th Shelf, and a "must-read book" by Maclean's. Featuring stories published in The New Yorker, Granta, and the O. Henry Prize Stories.
Startling, suspenseful, deeply humane yet alert to the undertow of our darker instincts, the eight stories in Animal Person illuminate what it means to exist in the perilous space between desire and action, and to have your faith in what you hold true buckle and give way.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Writer, Speaker and Producer Dev Ramsawakh talks with Chloé Cooper Jones—Pulitzer Prize finalist, philosophy professor, Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient—about Easy Beauty , her groundbreaking memoir about disability, motherhood, and a journey to far-flung places in search of a new way of seeing and being seen.
“I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.”
So begins Chloé Cooper Jones’s bold, revealing account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Jones learned early on to factor “pain calculations” into every plan, every situation. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis which affects both her stature and gait, her pain is physical. But there is also the pain of being judged and pitied for her appearance, of being dismissed as “less than.” The way she has been seen—or not seen—has informed her lens on the world her entire life. She resisted this reality by excelling academically and retreating to “the neutral room in her mind” until it passed. But after unexpectedly becoming a mother (in violation of unspoken social taboos about the disabled body), something in her shifts, and Jones sets off on a journey across the globe, reclaiming the spaces she’d been denied, and denied herself.
From the bars and domestic spaces of her life in Brooklyn to sculpture gardens in Rome; from film festivals in Utah to a Beyoncé concert in Milan; from a tennis tournament in California to the Killing Fields of Phnom Penh, Jones weaves memory, observation, experience, and aesthetic philosophy to probe the myths underlying our standards of beauty and desirability, and interrogates her own complicity in upholding those myths.
" With literary precision, he delves into the history and culture of conquest, drawing a direct line from actions committed hundreds of years ago to the planet’s current predicament. A singular achievement and a title of its time, The Nutmeg’s Curse reminds us why the land is crying." –Booklist
Sean Wilson sits down with Amitav Ghosh to discuss his latest, The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis . In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, Amitav finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism’s violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment.
A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning.
Join us for a conversation between Jana Buhlmann and Dr. Stefanie Green, a leading pioneer in medically assisted dying who began her career in the maternity ward and now helps patients who are suffering explore and then fulfill their end of life choices.
Dr. Stefanie Green has been forging new paths in the field of medical assistance in dying since 2016. In her landmark memoir, Dr. Green reveals the reasons a patient might seek an assisted death, how the process works, what the event itself can look like, the reactions of those involved, and what it feels like to oversee proceedings and administer medications that hasten death. She describes the extraordinary people she meets and the unusual circumstances she encounters as she navigates the intricacy, intensity, and utter humanity of these powerful interactions.
This Is Assisted Dying will change the way people think about their choices at the end of life, and show that assisted dying is less about death than about how we wish to live.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Peter Schneider sits down with the award-winning author of Ghost Wall and Summerwater. Sarah Moss’s latest novel The Fell is a riveting novel of mutual responsibility, personal freedom, and the ever-nearness of disaster.
Sarah Moss’s The Fell is a story of mutual responsibility, personal freedom, and compassion. Suspenseful, witty, and wise, it asks probing questions about how close so many live to the edge and about who we are in the world, who we are to our neighbors, and who we become when the world demands we shut ourselves away.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Join us for a look back at some highlights from past seasons of Writers Festival Radio as we head towards our 25th Anniversary this Fall.
This recap spotlights some content from Season 3, which ran in the Fall of 2021. Click play to hear from Yusef Salaam, Clayton Thomas-Muller, Jordan Abel, Elisabeth de Mariaffi, Melanie Challenger and Myriam J.A. Chancy.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Join us for a look back at some highlights from past seasons of Writers Festival Radio as we head towards our 25th Anniversary this Fall. This recap spotlights some content from Season 1, which ran in the Fall of 2020.
Click play for interview clips featuring Aislinn Hunter, David Eagleman, Will Ferguson, Shani Mootoo, Tara Henley and Stephen Nachmanovitch, and brief readings by Craig Davidson, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Andrew Pyper and Francis Boyle.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books. The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Join us for a look back at some highlights from past seasons of Writers Festival Radio as we head towards our 25th Anniversary this Fall. This recap spotlights some content from Season 2, which ran in the Spring of 2021.
Click play for interview clips featuring Stephanie Kelton, Annalee Newitz, Arkady Martine and Andri Snaer Magnason, and brief readings by Amanda Leduc, Kim Echlin, Jael Richardson and Camilla Gibb.
Lisa Samson hosts a conversation with Edith Blais on The Weight of Sand, her unforgettable memoir of the 450 days she spent in captivity, and her defiant refusal to have her humanity stripped away.
When Edith meets Luca in a small Northern town, the two connect instantly. Under the Northern Lights, they develop a deep friendship over their shared passions: travel, living off the land, a bohemian life. In search of wanderlust, they embark on an epic road trip from Italy to Togo, where they will join their friend's sustainable farming project. Upon arriving on the African continent, they change their itinerary and drive through Africa's Sahel region, a haven for militant groups, where they are surrounded and captured. Little was known about Edith's and Luca's fate until they reappeared in Mali more than one year later, having mysteriously escaped their captors.
Now, Edith shares her harrowing story with the world for the first time-complete with the poems that became a lifeline for her in captivity, which she wrote in secret with a pen borrowed from another hostage.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
The Festival’s Sean Wilson hosts a conversation with Alberta Book Award winner Todd Babiak about his latest acclaimed work, The Spirits Up, an unforgettable story of a family desperate for something to believe in.
Benedict is an inventor whose life’s work is a clean energy machine. It has just made him an overnight sensation and his family is suddenly wealthy. Benedict’s wife, Karen, and his teenage daughters, Charlotte and Poppy, are proud of him. But there are problems Benedict is too busy to see: Karen is deeply unhappy in the marriage and contemplating an affair, Charlotte, who is dealing with a chronic illness, is growing more and more distant, and Poppy is cracking under the pressures of her social circle. And there’s another problem. Benedict holds a rather terrible secret about his clean energy machine.
The Spirits Up is the story of a family haunted by the charmlessness of middle age and the cruelties of modern teenage life. Part social satire and part contemporary ghost story (with a hint of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol), it is an exploration of a timeless question: what happens when there’s nothing to believe?
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Writer, visual artist, and editor, Manahil Bandukwala hosts a conversation with acclaimed poet and lawyer Leslie Roach on her debut collection, Finish this Sentence. The poems examine personal experience in living with racism and healing from its distorting effects on the Self.
As this book weaves through the anger and anxiety provoked by racism, it points to the ultimate realization: one is neither the conditioning nor the negative thoughts that racism provokes. Rather, one is powerful and able to arrest those thoughts.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Join our host, Stephen Brockwell, for a conversation with Governor General's Award, Trillium Book Award and Ottawa Book Award-nominee Rob Winger on It Doesn't Matter What We Meant , a collection of poems that question perception, meaning, and context.
Partly an investigation of system versus system error, It Doesn't Matter What We Meant asks us to own up to our own inherited contexts, our own luck or misfortune, our own ways of moving through each weekday. From meditations on sleepy wind turbines to Voyager 1's dormant thrusters, from country road culverts to the factory floor's punch clock, from allied English-to-English folkloric translations to the crumbling limestone of misremembered basements, this is poetry that complicates what it means to live within and beyond the languages, lexicons, and locations around us.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Don’t miss this conversation between Elaine Bomberry, arts activist, promoter, producer, and former General Manager of Native Earth Performing Arts, and her big-hearted and joyful friend Tomson Highway, one of Canada’s most acclaimed Indigenous writers and performers. We are thrilled to welcome Tomson back to the Festival to celebrate the launch of his memoir, Permanent Astonishment .
Tomson Highway was born in a snowbank on an island in the sub-Arctic, the eleventh of twelve children in a nomadic, caribou-hunting Cree family. Growing up in a land of ten thousand lakes and islands, Tomson relished being pulled by dogsled beneath a night sky alive with stars, sucking the juices from roasted muskrat tails, and singing country music songs with his impossibly beautiful older sister and her teenaged friends.
Surrounded by the love of his family and the vast, mesmerizing landscape they called home, his was in many ways an idyllic far-north childhood. But five of Tomson's siblings died in childhood, and Balazee and Joe Highway, who loved their surviving children profoundly, wanted their two youngest sons, Tomson and Rene, to enjoy opportunities as big as the world. And so when Tomson was six, he was flown south by float plane to attend a residential school. A year later Rene joined him to begin the rest of their education. In 1990 Rene Highway, a world-renowned dancer, died of an AIDS-related illness.
Permanent Astonishment: Growing Up in the Land of Snow and Sky is Tomson's extravagant embrace of his younger brother's final words: "Don't mourn me, be joyful." His memoir offers insights, both hilarious and profound, into the Cree experience of culture, conquest, and survival.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Award winning author, public speaker and LGBTQ-Refugee activist, Danny Ramadan hosts this conversation on poetry, parenthood and hope with Lambda Literary and Stonewall Book Award-winner Hasan Namir.
Hasan’s latest acclaimed collection, Umbilical Cord , includes joyful perspectives about parenting, fatherhood and hope. These warm free-verse poems document the journey that he and his husband took to have a child. Between love letters to their young son, Namir shares insight into his love story with his husband, the complexities of the IVF surrogacy process and the first year as a family of three. Umbilical Cord is a heartfelt book for parents or would-be parents, with a universal message of hope.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Don’t miss this conversation between the Festival’s Sean Wilson and Amitava Kumar, the acclaimed author of Immigrant, Montana. His latest, A Time Outside This Time, is a one-of-a-kind novel about fake news, memory, and the ways in which truth can be not only stranger than fiction, but a fiction of its own.
When a writer named Satya attends a prestigious artist retreat, he finds the pressures of the outside world won't let up: President Trump rages online; a dangerous virus envelops the globe; and the 24-hour news cycle throws fuel on every fire. For most of the retreat fellows, such stories are unbearable distractions; but for Satya, these Orwellian interruptions begin to crystalize into an idea for his new novel, Enemies of the People, about the lies we tell ourselves and each other. Satya scours his life for moments where truth bends toward the imagined, and misinformation is mistaken as fact.
Sifting through newspaper clippings, the President's tweets, childhood memories from India, and moments as an immigrant, a husband, father, and teacher, A Time Outside This Time captures our feverish political moment with intelligence, beauty, and an eye for the uncanny. It is a brilliant meditation on life in a post-truth era. In the midst of the global pandemic, stretching on indefinitely, this piercing novel flawlessly captures the sentiment on everyone's mind of how impossible it can feel to remember, or to imagine, a time outside of this one.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Nora Loreto, author, journalist and co-host of the podcast Sandy and Nora Talk Politics hosts a conversation with author and professor Jessie Daniels. Her acclaimed new book is Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle It.
In a culture deeply divided by race, the “Karens” of the world are easy to villainize. But in Nice White Ladies, Jessie Daniels addresses the unintended complicity of even well-meaning white women. She reveals how their everyday choices harm communities of colour. She addresses a feminism that pushes women of color aside, and a wellness industry that insulates white women in a bubble of their own privilege.
Daniels then charts a better path forward. She looks to the white women who fight neo-Nazis online and in the streets, and who challenge all-white spaces from workplaces to schools to neighborhoods. In the end, she shows how her fellow white women can work toward true equality for all.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives
The Festival’s Neil Wilson sits down with author and journalist Elaine Dewar, winner of nine National Magazine awards, to discuss her latest publication, On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: An Investigation .
"[Dewar] has spent the pandemic following the politics, the scientific research, the news coverage—and the money … Her book casts a shadow over the wet market theory and points a finger at the Chinese government—and at some scientists and leading science journals for their single-minded support and promotion of this theory … The book reads almost like a detective novel." — The Globe and Mail
When the first TV newscast described a SARS-like flu affecting a distant Chinese metropolis, investigative journalist Elaine Dewar started asking questions: Was SARS-CoV-2 something that came from nature, as leading scientists insisted, or did it come from a lab, and what role might controversial experiments have played in its development? Why was Wuhan the pandemic's ground zero—and why, on the other side of the Atlantic, had two researchers been marched out of a lab in Winnipeg by the RCMP? Why were governments so slow to respond to the emerging pandemic, and why, now, is the government of China refusing to cooperate with the World Health Organization? And who, or what, is DRASTIC?
Locked down in Toronto with the world at a standstill, Dewar pored over newspapers and magazines, preprints and peer-reviewed journals, email chains and blacked-out responses to access to information requests; she conducted Zoom interviews and called telephone numbers until someone answered as she hunted down the truth of the virus’s origin.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
CBC’s Adrian Harewood sits down with Myriam J.A. Chancy to discuss her acclaimed new novel on the 2010 Haiti earthquake, What Storm, What Thunder.
At the end of a long, sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince.
Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster–Richard, an expat and wealthy water-bottling executive with a secret daughter; the daughter, Anne, an architect who drafts affordable housing structures for a global NGO; a small-time drug trafficker, Leopold, who pines for a beautiful call girl; Sonia and her business partner, Dieudonné, who are followed by a man they believe is the vodou spirit of death; Didier, an emigrant musician who drives a taxi in Boston; Sara, a mother haunted by the ghosts of her children in an IDP camp; her husband, Olivier, an accountant forced to abandon the wife he loves; their son, Jonas, who haunts them both; and Ma Lou, the old woman selling produce in the market who remembers them all. Artfully weaving together these lives, this gripping story gives witness to the desolation wreaked by nature and by man.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Sean Wilson sits down with novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest, Ruth Ozeki to discuss The Book of Form and Emptiness , an inventive new novel about loss, growing up, and our relationship with things. Don’t miss this conversation with the Booker Prize-finalist author of A Tale for the Time Being.
One year after the death of his beloved musician father, thirteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house—a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous.
At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world. He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many.
And he meets his very own Book—a talking thing—who narrates Benny’s life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Poet and playwright David O’Meara sits down with two-time Governor General’s Literary Award winner and 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize nominee Jordan Tannahill to discuss The Listeners, a propulsive literary page-turner about a family torn apart by a mother’s obsession with a sound that no one else can hear.
One night, while lying in bed next to her husband, Claire Devon suddenly hears a low hum. This innocuous sound, which no one else in the house can hear, has no obvious source or medical cause, but it begins to upset the balance of Claire’s life. When she discovers that one of her students can also hear the hum, the two strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship. Finding themselves increasingly isolated from their families and colleagues, they fall in with a disparate group of people who also perceive the sound. What starts out as a kind of neighbourhood self-help group gradually transforms into something much more extreme, with far-reaching, devastating consequences.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Join us for a conversation between Robert J. Wiersema and Booker-Nominee Max Porter about his latest book, The Death of Francis Bacon.
Francis Bacon is on his deathbed. Max Porter reimagines his final dying fever dreams in a magisterial appreciation of one of the greatest artists of all time. It is as filthy, clever, luminescent, dark and wild as Bacon himself.
In this bold and brilliant short work of experimental fiction by the author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny, Max Porter inhabits Francis Bacon in his final moments, translating into seven extraordinary written pictures the explosive final workings of the artist's mind. Writing as painting rather than about painting, Porter lets the images he conjures speak for themselves as they take their revenge on the subject who wielded them in life.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Join us for a conversation between chris johnson, ARC Poetry’s Managing Editor, and Evan J, poet, advocate and educator, on his collection Ripping down the trees .
One out of every twenty students in the adult education classes Evan J teaches in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, dies every year; the surviving students are often afflicted by severe racism, poverty, addictions, and violence. Ripping down half the trees engages with these struggles, offering a catalogue of experiences specific to the remote regions of Canada.
Tearing down the façade of Canadian justice and equality to expose the racism, colonialism, sexism, prejudicial capitalism, and ableism at the nation's core, these are poems about cruelty, both the obvious and the ambient. They are unflinching in their sociopolitical criticism, upset by unchanging systemic oppressions, unable to overlook the threat of the author's white skin, unwilling to forget Justin Trudeau in blackface. And while they acknowledge the limits of the author's privileged perspective, they are never willing to let the perpetrating structures of this cruelty go unchecked.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
CKCU’s Susan Johnston sits down with Booker Prize nominee Alison MacLeod to discuss Tenderness , an ambitious, spellbinding historical novel about sensuality, censorship, and the novel that set off the sexual revolution.
On the glittering shores of the Mediterranean in 1928, a dying author in exile races to complete his final novel. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a sexually bold love story, a searing indictment of class distinctions, and a study in sensuality. But the author, D.H. Lawrence, knows it will be censored. He publishes it privately, loses his copies to customs, and dies bereft.
Alison MacLeod recreates the novel’s origins and boldly imagines its journey to freedom through the story of Jackie Kennedy, who was known to be an admirer. In MacLeod's telling, Jackie—in her last days before becoming first lady—learns that publishers are trying to bring D.H. Lawrence’s long-censored novel to American and British readers in its full form. The US government has responded by targeting the postal service for distributing obscene material. Enjoying what anonymity she has left, determined to honour a novel she loves, Jackie attends the hearing incognito. But there she is quickly recognized, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover takes note of her interest and her outrage.
Through the story of Lawrence’s writing of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the historic obscenity trial that sought to suppress it in the United Kingdom, and the men and women who fought for its worldwide publication, Alison MacLeod captures the epic sweep of the twentieth century from war and censorship to sensuality and freedom.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Don’t miss the conversation between acclaimed author Amanda Leduc and Lambda Literary Award winning author, poet and screenwriter, Zoe Whittall on her latest novel, The Spectacular .
It’s taboo to regret motherhood. But what would happen if you did? Shifting perspectives and time periods, The Spectacular is a multi-generational story exploring sexuality, gender and the weight of reproductive freedoms, from the author of The Best Kind of People.
In her new book, Zoe Whittall captures three generations of very different women who struggle to build an authentic life in the absence of traditional familial and marital structures. Definitions of family, romance, gender and love will radically change as they seek out lives that are nothing less than spectacular.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Acclaimed author and Toronto Star contributor Janet Somerville sits down with Giller-shortlisted author Kathleen Winter about her latest, Undersong , a reimagining of the lost years of misunderstood Romantic Era genius Dorothy Wordsworth.
When young James Dixon, a local jack-of-all-trades recently returned from the Battle of Waterloo, meets writer Dorothy Wordsworth, he quickly realizes he’s never met another woman anything like her. In her early thirties at the time of the meeting, Dorothy has already lived a wildly unconventional life. As her famous brother William Wordsworth’s confidante and creative collaborator—considered by some in their circle to be the secret to his success as a poet—she has carved a seemingly idyllic existence for herself, alongside William and his wife, in England’s Lake District.
Through the fictional James Dixon—a gentle but troubled soul, more attuned to the wonders of the garden he faithfully tends than to vexing worldly matters—we step inside the Wordsworth family, witnessing their dramatic emotional and artistic struggles, hidden traumas, private betrayals and triumphs. At the same time, Winter slowly weaves a darker, complex “undersong” through the novel, one as earthy and elemental as flower and tree, gradually revealing the pattern of Dorothy's rich, hidden life—that of a woman determined, against all odds, to exist on her own terms despite societal norms.
Don’t miss this conversation between two bestselling masters of suspense. Amy Stuart, author of Still Here, sits down with Elisabeth de Mariaffi to discuss her new novel, The Retreat.
Everyone has a secret to keep . . .
Maeve Martin arrives at the High Water Center for the Arts determined to do one thing: launch her own dance company. Time is running out for the former principal dancer and mother of two to find her feet again after the collapse of a disastrous and violent marriage. At first, there’s a thrill to being on her own for the first time in years, isolated in the beauty of a snowy mountain lodge.
But when an avalanche traps the guests inside, tensions run high. Help is coming, so they just have to hold on, don’t they? But as days pass, the other guests are struck down by mysterious deaths, one by one. Now, as she waits in fear, Maeve must admit how little she knows about anyone else . . . and how useless a locked door is if the darkness is already inside.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Join us for a conversation between the Festival’s Neil Wilson and Clayton Thomas-Muller, author of Life in the City of Dirty Water, an electrifying memoir that braids together the urgent issues of Indigenous rights and environmental policy,
Tying together personal stories of survival that bring the realities of the First Nations of this land into sharp focus, and lessons learned from a career as a frontline activist committed to addressing environmental injustice at a global scale, Thomas-Muller offers a narrative and vision of healing and responsibility.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
CBC’s Judy Trinh hosts a conversation with award-winning documentary filmmaker Ann Shin, about her debut novel, The Last Exiles , a searing portrait of a young couple in Pyongyang and their fight for love and freedom
Jin and Suja meet and fall in love while studying at university in Pyongyang. She is a young journalist from a prominent family, while he is from a small village of little means. When Jin returns home to find his family starving, their food rations all but gone, he makes a rash decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, miles away, Suja has learned that Jin has disappeared. Risking everything, she sets out to find him, embarking on a dangerous journey that will test their love and will to survive.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Don’t miss this conversation between acclaimed author, editor and translator, Wayne Grady and internationally-renowned poet, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, librettist and scholar, George Elliott Clarke, on his latest publication, Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir
At the book’s heart is George’s turbulent relationship with his father, an autodidact who valued art, music and books but worked an unfulfilling railway job. George recalls Bill using a bowl of white sugar and a bowl of brown sugar to explain racial difference to him and his brothers when they were very small. But Bill also acted out destructive frustrations, assaulting George’s mother and sometimes George and his brothers, too.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
What makes us human, and why are we so sure we're different from other animals? Sean Wilson sits down with Melanie Challenger to discuss her acclaimed new book, How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human.
Using a combination of memoir, historical texts, interweaving interviews and cultural and environmental history, How to Be Animal is a book for anyone who has ever contemplated what humans are and what makes our species so simultaneously brilliant and awful. Even more so, it is a book that asks tantalizing philosophical questions, such as whether and how human life matters.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Join the Festival’s Sean Wilson for a conversation with debut novelist Genki Ferguson. Set in 1999 Japan, Satellite Love is an unconventional story about a girl, a boy, and a satellite--and a bittersweet meditation on loneliness, alienation, and what it means to be human.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Join us for a conversation between poet Manahil Bandukwala and Tessa McWatt, the author of The Snow Line, a novel that explores love and endurance in the face of change and violence, and how people find wholeness and belonging when their own identities feel shattered.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
CBC’s Adrian Harewood hosts prison reform activist Yusef Salaam, of the Exonerated Five, for a conversation on his acclaimed memoir, Better, Not Bitter: Living on Purpose in the Pursuit of Racial Justice.
Better Not Bitter is the first time that one of the now Exonerated Five is telling his individual story, in his own words. Yusef writes his narrative: growing up Black in central Harlem in the '80s, being raised by a strong, fierce mother and grandmother, his years of incarceration, his reentry, and exoneration. Yusef connects these stories to lessons and principles he learned that gave him the power to survive through the worst of life's experiences. He inspires readers to accept their own path, to understand their own sense of purpose. With his intimate personal insights, Yusef unpacks the systems built and designed for profit and the oppression of Black and Brown people. He inspires readers to channel their fury into action, and through the spiritual, to turn that anger and trauma into a constructive force that lives alongside accountability and mobilizes change.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
David O’Meara sits down with Griffin Poetry Prize winner Jordan Abel to discuss his latest publication, NISHGA , a groundbreaking, deeply personal, and devastating autobiographical meditation that attempts to address the complicated legacies of Canada's residential school system and contemporary Indigenous existence.
As a Nisga'a writer, Jordan Abel often finds himself in a position where he is asked to explain his relationship to Nisga'a language, Nisga'a community, and Nisga'a cultural knowledge. However, as an intergenerational survivor of residential school--both of his grandparents attended the same residential school--his relationship to his own Indigenous identity is complicated to say the least.
NISHGA explores those complications and is invested in understanding how the colonial violence originating at the Coqualeetza Indian Residential School impacted his grandparents' generation, then his father's generation, and ultimately his own. The project is rooted in a desire to illuminate the realities of intergenerational survivors of residential school, but sheds light on Indigenous experiences that may not seem to be immediately (or inherently) Indigenous.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Join us for a taste of the latest Blackthorn Key middle grade adventure from Kevin Sands. Kevin spent time with teachers David Farley and Pam Jones and their students at Connaught Public School and Fisher Park Middle School / Summit Alternative School.
Christopher’s homecoming takes a sinister turn when a murderous conspiracy is uncovered in The Traitor's Blade, the fifth novel of the award-winning Blackthorn Key series.
Christopher, Tom, and Sally are back in London at last. Everyone is relieved at their return—the plague has ended, and the king, pleased with their service, offers a surprising reward. But trouble has followed them home...
First, an old friend is ambushed and left for dead. Then an anonymous letter arrives at Blackthorn—a mysterious warning hidden inside a riddle and secret code. As Christopher and his friends begin to investigate, they soon discover they’ve stumbled upon a plot to kill the king...and anyone else who dares stand in the traitors’ way.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives .
Ian Brown, bestselling author and a feature writer for The Globe and Mail, sits down with Cathrin Bradbury, a Senior News Director at CBC News, to discuss her acclaimed memoir, The Bright Side: Twelve Months, Three Heartbreaks, and One (Maybe) Miracle.
Cathrin Bradbury's life imploded in the space of a few months. Her beloved parents died, her marriage limped to an end after twenty-five years, her heavily mortgaged house turned against her, and a promising new romance ended in crushing disappointment.
But somewhere in that year, a new path, or three or four, began to open up. As Bradbury navigates the setbacks, her troubled brother makes an astounding recovery to health and sobriety. She is reunited with her closest childhood friend after a long absence, with deeply satisfying results. She and her four siblings feel their way to becoming a new kind of family without their parents. And her adult children emerge into sharper focus, each gloriously and uniquely themselves. Slowly, she discovers that the path is steep, the view obscured, but there's light ahead.
Cathartic, hilarious, and moving, The Bright Side broadens the way we think and talk to each other about the ordinary experiences we all share.
Ian Brown, bestselling author and a feature writer for The Globe and Mail, sits down with David Macfarlane, author of the classic memoir The Danger Tree to discuss his latest, Likeness: Fathers, sons, a portrait, an occasionally hilarious, sometimes heart-breaking meditation on love, memory, and the fathomless depths of grief.
Likeness is a multi-generational story told through the vehicle of a painting, a portrait of Macfarlane by the well-known Canadian artist, John Hartman. The painting has ended up unexpectedly, temporarily, and enormously in Macfarlane's living room. He looks at it—a lot. It's hard to avoid.
To Macfarlane's surprise, the painting becomes a portal—not only into his own past, but into his father's, too. Through these two histories is woven the present—one dominated by illness. Macfarlane's son undergoes treatment for leukemia during the time the painting hangs in the family living room. Blake is a young man rich in creative possibility. There is music to be composed. There are films to be made. But Blake's future is as circumscribed by fate as his father's was wide open. A tragic difference, eloquently noted.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
Don’t miss this conversation between Peter Schneider, Manager and Executive Secretary of the Public Lending Right Program, and M.G. Vassanji, two-time Giller Prize winner and winner of the Governor General's Literary Award. Vassanji’s latest collection of short fiction, What You Are, explores the tensions between remembering past homes and belonging in new ones.
Weaving between wistful memories of youthful ambition and the compromises and comforts of age, travelling between the streets of Dar es Salaam and Toronto, the characters in these stories must negotiate distance--between here and there; between lives imagined and lives lived; between expectation and disappointment; between inclusion and exclusion.
Throughout, Vassanji engages passionately with the intellectual and political questions that inspire him as a writer and a citizen, while always matching the energy of his ideas with the empathy and emotional depth he invests in his characters. As with all Vassanji's finest work, What You Are stands as a model of artistic integrity and clarity of vision.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
Broadcaster and entrepreneur Mark Sutcliffe sits down with Damon Centola, Director of the Network Dynamics Group at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of the bestseller, Change: How to Make Big Things Happen .
When it comes to lasting change in what we think or the way we live, the dynamics are different: beliefs and behaviors are not transmitted from person to person in the simple way that a virus is. The real story of social change is more complex. When we are exposed to a new idea, our social networks guide our responses in striking and surprising ways.
Drawing on deep-yet-accessible research and fascinating examples from the spread of coronavirus to the success of the Black Lives Matter movement, the failure of Google+, and the rise of political polarization, Change presents groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting new science for understanding what drives change, and how we can change the world around us.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
We celebrate Katherena Vermette’s graphic novel series, A Girl Called Echo, on the occasion of the fourth volume’s publication. The Governor General’s Award winning Métis writer from Treaty 1 territory, Winnipeg, Manitoba, sits down with fellow Winnipeg GG winner David Alexander Robertson, author of the acclaimed Misewa Saga and numerous graphic novels, including Sugar Falls: A Residential School Story.
In Vermette’s Road Allowance Era, Echo’s story picks up again when she travels back in time to 1885. The government has not fulfilled its promise of land for the Métis, and many flee to the Northwest. As part of the fallout from the Northwest Resistance, their advocate and champion Louis Riel is executed. As new legislation corrodes Métis land rights, and unscrupulous land speculators and swindlers take advantage, many Métis settle on road allowances and railway land, often on the fringes of urban centres.
For Echo, the plight of her family is apparent. Burnt out of their home in Ste. Madeleine, they make their way to Rooster Town, a shanty community on the southwest edges of Winnipeg. In this final instalment of her story, Echo is reminded of the strength and resilience of her people, forged through the loss and pain of the past, as she faces a triumphant future.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives .
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
Don’t miss this conversation hosted by nina jane drystek, a 2020 Bronwen Wallace Award-nominee and acclaimed experimental poet Sarah Burgoyne, about her second collection, Because the Sun , which thinks with and against Camus’ extensive notebooks and the iconic outlaw film Thelma & Louise.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books .
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider ubscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
Edward Rutherfurd returns to the Festival with his latest bestseller, China: The Novel, for a conversation with Janet Somerville, author, educator and reviewer of Historical Fiction for the Toronto Star.
Edward Rutherfurd has enthralled millions of readers with his grand, sweeping historical sagas that tell the history of a famous place over multiple generations. Now, in China: The Novel, Rutherfurd takes readers into the rich and fascinating milieu of the Middle Kingdom.
The story begins in 1839, at the dawn of the First Opium War, and follows Chinese history through Mao's Cultural Revolution and up to the present day. Rutherfurd chronicles the rising and falling fortunes of members of Chinese, British, and American families, as they negotiate the tides of history. Along the way, in his signature style, Rutherfurd provides a deeply researched portrait of Chinese history and society, its ancient traditions and great upheavals, and China's emergence as a rising global power. As always, we are treated to romance and adventure, heroines and scoundrels, grinding struggle and incredible fortunes.
From Shanghai to Nanking to the Great Wall, China: The Novel, chronicles the turbulent rise and fall of empires as the colonial West meets the opulent and complex East in a dramatic struggle between cultures and people.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
Kingston’s Wayne Grady returns to the Festival for a conversation with Susan Johnston, host of CKCU’s Asking for A Friend, about his latest book, The Good Father, his first contemporary novel. Told in alternating perspectives, it comically and tragically reckons with a father and daughter's estrangement, the failures brought on by hubris, the limits of perception and the price we pay for second chances.
Every story has two sides, two perspectives. And when it comes to a relationship between a daughter and her father, separated first by divorce and then by both generational gaps and physical and emotional distance, those perspectives can colossally diverge.
Such is the case with Harry Bowes and his only daughter, Daphne. Harry is a mild mannered journalist turned teacher turned wine merchant who is content to putter around his home in Toronto eating things straight out of the fridge that both his doctor and his second wife, Elinor, would disapprove of, and procrastinate calling his daughter even though he senses something is amiss. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, Daphne seems intent on a course of nihilism, having gone from being a loving girl to a top student to a hostile young woman who is determined to destroy her life and relationships by self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. When a catastrophic event wrenches them out of their states, one of stasis and one of chaos, Harry and Daphne are forced to examine the ways in which their self-absorption has eroded their connection and discover whether a family's bond is truly ironclad or if their damage is irreparable.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives .
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
Join the Festival’s Artistic Director, Sean Wilson, for a conversation on Hummingbird Salamander, a speculative thriller of dark conspiracy, endangered species, and the end of all things, with international bestseller Jeff VanderMeer.
Software manager Jane Smith receives an envelope containing a key to a storage unit that holds a taxidermied hummingbird and salamander. Alongside the key is a list of five other animals. The list is signed, "Love, Silvina." Jane does not know a Silvina, and she wants nothing to do with the taxidermied animals. The hummingbird and salamander are, it turns out, two of the most endangered species in the world. Silvina Vilcapampa, the woman who left the note, is a reputed eco-terrorist, and the daughter of a recently deceased Argentine industrialist. And by removing the hummingbird and the salamander from the storage unit, Jane has set into motion a series of events over which she has no control.
Instantly, Jane and her family are in danger and she finds herself alone and on the run from both Silvina's family and her eco-terrorist accomplices--along with the wildlife traffickers responsible for the strange taxidermy. She seems fated to follow in Silvina's footsteps as she desperately seeks answers about why Silvina contacted her, and why she is now at the centre of this global conspiracy, and what exactly Silvina was planning. Time is running out -- for her and possibly for the world.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books .
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
Don’t miss acclaimed author Kagiso Lesego Molope, winner of the City of Ottawa Book Award, in conversation with Vancouver’s Tanya Boteju. Bruised is a vibrant coming-of-age story about a teen girl navigating first love, identity, and grief as she immerses herself in the colorful, brutal, beautiful world of roller derby—from the acclaimed author of Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens.
To Daya Wijesinghe, a bruise is a mixture of comfort and control. Since her parents died in an accident she survived, bruises have become a way to keep her pain on the surface of her skin so she doesn’t need to deal with the ache deep in her heart.
So when chance and circumstances bring her to a roller derby bout, Daya is hooked. Yes, the rules are confusing and the sport seems to require the kind of teamwork and human interaction Daya generally avoids. But the opportunities to bruise are countless, and Daya realizes that if she’s going to keep her emotional pain at bay, she’ll need all the opportunities she can get.
The deeper Daya immerses herself into the world of roller derby, though, the more she realizes it’s not the simple physical pain-fest she was hoping for. Her rough-and-tumble teammates and their fans push her limits in ways she never imagined, bringing Daya to big truths about love, loss, strength, and healing.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books .
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives .
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
Susan Johnston, host of CKCU’s Asking for A Friend, sits down with acclaimed Ottawa-based author and poet Nina Berkhout to talk about her most recent novel, Why Birds Sing.
After a very public onstage flameout, a disgraced opera singer is confronted with her crumbling marriage, a prickly and unexpected brother-in-law, and a cheeky parrot named Tulip ? and she must learn to whistle her way through it all.
From the author of Harper’s Bazaar Hottest Breakout Novel The Gallery of Lost Species comes a charming, lively, and deeply felt story that is perfect for readers of Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness and Amy Jones’s We’re All in this Together.
When opera singer Dawn Woodward has an onstage flameout, all she wants is to be left alone. She’s soon faced with other complications the day her husband announces her estranged brother-in-law, Tariq, is undergoing cancer treatment and moving in, his temperamental parrot in tow. To make matters worse, though she can’t whistle herself, she has been tasked with teaching arias to an outspoken group of devoted siffleurs who call themselves the Warblers. Eventually, Tariq and his bird join the class, and Dawn forms unexpected friendships with her new companions. But when her marriage shows signs of trouble and Tariq’s health declines, she begins questioning her foundations, including the career that she has worked so hard to build and the true nature of love and song.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books .
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library .
Join the Toronto Star’s Books Editor, Deborah Dundas for a conversation with New York Times bestselling author Andrew Morton. Andrew’s latest international bestseller, Elizabeth & Margaret: The Intimate World of the Windsor Sisters, follows Queen Elizabeth II and her sister Margaret as they navigate life in the royal spotlight.
They were the closest of sisters and the best of friends. But when, in a quixotic twist of fate, their uncle Edward Vlll decided to abdicate the throne, the dynamic between Elizabeth and Margaret was dramatically altered. Forever more Margaret would have to curtsey to the sister she called 'Lillibet.' And bow to her wishes.
Elizabeth would always look upon her younger sister's antics with a kind of stoical amusement, but Margaret's struggle to find a place and position inside the royal system—and her fraught relationship with its expectations—was often a source of tension. Famously, the Queen had to inform Margaret that the Church and government would not countenance her marrying a divorcee, Group Captain Peter Townsend, forcing Margaret to choose between keeping her title and royal allowances or her divorcee lover.
From the idyll of their cloistered early life, through their hidden war-time lives, into the divergent paths they took following their father's death and Elizabeth's ascension to the throne, this book explores their relationship over the years. Andrew Morton's latest biography offers unique insight into these two drastically different sisters—one resigned to duty and responsibility, the other resistant to it—and the lasting impact they have had on the Crown, the royal family, and the ways it adapted to the changing mores of the 20th century.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives .
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library .
Peter Schneider, Manager and Executive Secretary of the Public Lending Right Program, sits down with author and publisher Linda Leith to discuss her memoir, The Girl from Dream City: A Literary Life .
It's the life that many dream of: education in some of Europe's most beautiful cities before becoming a novelist, essayist, translator and literary curator.
But the start of Linda Leith's journey is anything but idyllic. The daughter of a glamorous mother and a charming left-wing doctor, she is never told of her father's psychiatric breakdown or his subsequent shock therapy for what was then called manic depression.
As this secret festers, Leith's father uproots the family to various European cities as he reinvents himself as a corporate executive, eventually moving across the Atlantic to Montreal.
It's there, in her first year of university, that Leith is inspired by Madame de Staël: a writer and salonnière, banished from Paris by Napoleon himself. With none of Staël's advantages-no wealth, no social status, no château on Lake Geneva-Leith can scarcely imagine a salon, but she is drawn to Paris, and dreams of becoming a writer.
This dream fuels her education in London, her marriage and writing in Budapest, and-finally-her journey back to Montreal where she meets a community of writers and readers who she works with to transform the city's literary scene.
As Leith publishes, translates, and curates, she also comes to terms with her troubled father and the secrets of her childhood.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books .
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives .
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library .
Neil Wilson, Director of The Republic of Childhood, sits down with Iceland’s Andri Snaer Magnason, a finalist for the 2021 Nordic Council Literature Prize, to talk about his latest book, On Time and Water.
Asked by a leading climate scientist why he wasn’t writing about the greatest crisis mankind has faced, Andri Snær Magnason, one of Iceland’s most beloved writers and public intellectuals, protested: he wasn’t a specialist, he said. It wasn’t his field. But the scientist persisted: “If you cannot understand our scientific findings and present them in an emotional, psychological, poetic or mythological context,” he told him, “then no one will really understand the issue, and the world will end.”
Based on interviews and advice from leading glacial, ocean, climate, and geographical scientists, and interwoven with personal, historical, and mythological stories, Magnason’s resulting response is a rich and compelling work of narrative nonfiction that illustrates the reality of climate change and offers hope in the face of an uncertain future. Moving from reflections on how one writes an obituary for a glacier to exhortation for a heightened understanding of human time and our obligations to one another, throughout history and across the globe, On Time and Water is both deeply personal and globally minded: a travel story, a world history, a desperate plea to live in harmony with future generations—and is unlike anything that has yet been published on the current climate emergency.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library
Don’t miss this conversation with Arkady Martine, the Hugo Award Winning author of the Teixcalaan books, A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace . In addition to her work in speculative fiction, she is a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a policy advisor for the New Mexico Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department, where she works on climate change mitigation, energy grid modernization, and resiliency planning.
In A Desolation Called Peace, an alien armada lurks on the edges of Teixcalaanli space. No one can communicate with it, no one can destroy it, and Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus is running out of options.
In a desperate attempt at diplomacy with the mysterious invaders, the fleet captain has sent for a diplomatic envoy. Now Mahit Dzmare and Three Seagrass—still reeling from the recent upheaval in the Empire—face the impossible task of trying to communicate with a hostile entity.
Their failure will guarantee millions of deaths in an endless war. Their success might prevent Teixcalaan’s destruction—and allow the empire to continue its rapacious expansion.
Or it might create something far stranger . . .
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
We celebrate poetry month with a conversation between Ellen Chang-Richardson, the founder of Little Birds Poetry and the co-founder of Riverbed Reading Series, and David Ly about his debut collection, Mythical Man .
David Ly builds, and then tears down, an army of men in a quest to explore personhood in the 21st century. Tenderness, toxic masculinity, nuances of queer love, and questions of race and identity mix in the poetry, casting a spell that enters like "a warm tongue on a first date.”
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books .
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives .
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library .
Bestselling author Ausma Zehanat Khan hosts a conversation with Uzma Jalaluddin about her acclaimed new YA novel, Hana Khan Carries On.
From the author of Ayesha at Last comes a sparkling new rom-com set in two competing halal restaurants.
Sales are slow at Three Sisters Biryani Poutine, the only halal restaurant in the close-knit Golden Crescent neighbourhood. Hana waitresses there part time, but what she really wants is to tell stories on the radio. If she can just outshine her fellow intern at the city radio station, she may have a chance at landing a job. In the meantime, Hana pours her thoughts and dreams into a podcast, where she forms a lively relationship with one of her listeners. But soon she’ll need all the support she can get: a new competing restaurant, a more upscale halal place, is about to open in the Golden Crescent, threatening Three Sisters.
When her mysterious aunt and her teenage cousin arrive from India for a surprise visit, they draw Hana into a long-buried family secret. A hate-motivated attack on their neighbourhood complicates the situation further, as does Hana’s growing attraction for Aydin, the young owner of the rival restaurant—who might not be a complete stranger after all.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives .
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
Educator, author, editor and publisher. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm hosts a conversation with Dr. Norma Dunning about her latest collection of stories, Tainna: The Unseen Ones .
Drawing on both lived experience and cultural memory, Norma Dunning brings together six powerful new short stories centred on modern-day Inuk characters in Tainna. Ranging from homeless to extravagantly wealthy, from spiritual to jaded, young to elderly, and even from alive to deceased, Dunning’s characters are united by shared feelings of alienation, displacement and loneliness resulting from their experiences in southern Canada.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books .
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library
Join Sean Wilson for a conversation with acclaimed author and journalist Annalee Newitz on their bestselling book, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, a quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history—and figure out why people abandoned them.
In Four Lost Cities, Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today.
Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers—slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers—who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia.
Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives .
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
Author, editor and poet, Rhonda Douglas hosts a conversation with Camilla Gibb, winner of the Trillium Book Award and the City of Toronto Book Award about her new novel, The Relatives .
Lila is on a long, painful journey toward motherhood. Tess and Emily are reeling after their ugly separation and fighting over ownership of the embryos that were supposed to grow their family together. And thousands of miles away, the unknown man who served as anonymous donor to them all is being held in captivity in Somalia. While his life remains in precarious balance, his genetic material is a source of both creation and conflict.
What does it mean to be a family in our rapidly shifting world? What are our responsibilities to each other with increasing options for how to create a family?
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books .
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives .
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
Our Artistic Director, Sean Wilson, hosts a conversation with Stephanie Kelton, the leading thinker and most visible public advocate of modern monetary theory. Her book, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy, is a bold, new understanding for how to build a just and prosperous society.
Stephanie Kelton's exploration of modern monetary theory (MMT) dramatically changes our understanding of how we can best deal with crucial issues ranging from poverty and inequality to creating jobs, expanding health care coverage, climate change, and building resilient infrastructure. Any ambitious proposal, however, inevitably runs into the buzz saw of how to find the money to pay for it, rooted in myths about deficits that are hobbling us as a country.
MMT, as Kelton shows, shifts the terrain from narrow budgetary questions to one of broader economic and social benefits. With its important new ways of understanding money, taxes, and the critical role of deficit spending, MMT redefines how to responsibly use our resources so that we can maximize our potential as a society. MMT gives us the power to imagine a new politics and a new economy and move from a narrative of scarcity to one of opportunity.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
Author, editor and poet, Stuart Ross, hosts a conversation with Gary Barwin, author of the Giller Prize shortlisted Yiddish for Pirates, about his latest novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
Amanda Leduc, author of The Centaur’s Wife, in conversation with her friend and colleague Jael Richardson, founder of the Festival of Literary Diversity, and author of the bestselling novel Gutter Child.
Set in an imagined world in which the most vulnerable are forced to buy their freedom by working off their debt to society, Gutter Child uncovers a nation divided into the privileged Mainland and the policed Gutter. In this world, Elimina Dubois is one of only 100 babies taken from the Gutter and raised in the land of opportunity as part of a social experiment led by the Mainland government.
But when her Mainland mother dies, Elimina finds herself all alone, a teenager forced into an unfamiliar life of servitude, unsure of who she is and where she belongs. Elimina is sent to an academy with new rules and expectations where she befriends Gutter children who are making their own way through the Gutter System in whatever ways they know how. When Elimina’s life takes another unexpected turn, she will discover that what she needs more than anything may not be the freedom she longs for after all.
Richardson’s Gutter Child reveals one young woman’s journey through a fractured world of heartbreaking disadvantages and shocking injustices. Elimina is a modern heroine in an altered but all too recognizable reality who must find the strength within herself to forge her future and defy a system that tries to shape her destiny.
Deborah Dundas, Books Editor at the Toronto Star, in conversation with New York Times bestseller Mary Lawson.
Mary Lawson, acclaimed for digging into the "wilderness of the human heart,” is back after almost a decade with a fresh and timely novel that is different in subject but just as emotional and atmospheric as her beloved earlier work.
A Town Called Solace opens on a family in crisis: rebellious teenager Rose been missing for weeks with no word, and Rose's younger sister, the feisty and fierce Clara, keeps a daily vigil at the living-room window, hoping for her sibling's return.
Told through three distinct, compelling points of view, the novel cuts back and forth among these unforgettable characters to uncover the layers of grief, remorse, and love that connect families, both the ones we're born into and the ones we choose. A Town Called Solace is a masterful, suspenseful and deeply humane novel by one of our great storytellers.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books .
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Presented in partnership with the Ottawa Public Library.
Author and poet, Rhonda Douglas, hosts a conversation with Kim Echlin, the internationally bestselling and Giller-shortlisted author of The Disappeared. Her latest, Speak, Silence, is a poetic novel about war and loss, suffering and courage, and the strength of women through it all.
It’s been eleven years since Gota has seen Kosmos, yet she still finds herself fantasizing about their intimate year together in Paris. Now it’s 1999 and, working as a journalist, she hears about a film festival in Sarajevo, where she knows Kosmos will be with his theatre company. She takes the assignment to investigate the fallout of the Bosnian war—and to reconnect with the love of her life. But when they are reunited, she finds a man, and a country, altered beyond recognition.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Author and poet, Rhonda Douglas, hosts a conversation with novelist Catherine Bush whose latest, Blaze Island, was a Globe and Mail Best Book, a Writers' Trust of Canada Best Book and was praised as “One of the 20 books you need to read this winter” by Maclean’s Magazine.
The time is now or an alternate near now, the world close to our own. A Category Five hurricane sweeps up the eastern seaboard of North America, leaving devastation in its wake, its outer wings brushing over tiny Blaze Island. During this wild night, a stranger washes up on the doorstep of the isolated house where Milan Wells lives with his daughter Miranda.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Author and educator Julie S. Lalonde hosts a conversation with acclaimed author Amanda Leduc.
Amanda Leduc's brilliant new novel, The Centaur’s Wife , is woven with fairy tales of her own devising and replete with both catastrophe and magic. It is a vision of what happens when we ignore the natural world and the darker parts of our own natures.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Author and journalist Hattie Klotz hosts a conversation with Ashley Audrain whose debut novel, The Push , was an instant national bestseller.
A tense, page-turning psychological drama about the making and breaking of a family, told through the eyes of a woman whose experience of motherhood is nothing at all what she hoped for--and everything she feared.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Improvisation offers us insights into communication that just might open new doors to discovery and enchantment that could enrich our lives and lead to a deeper and fuller appreciation of what it means to connect with people and our environment. What does this mean in the lives of children who are just beginning to discover their own voices and agency?
This Republic of Childhood episode of the podcast examines the importance of early childhood education in preventing stigma and trauma in young people with Kim Hellemans, Chair Department of Neuroscience, Carleton University and Jane Bertrand, Program Director, Margaret and Wallace McCain Family Foundation.
In this Republic of Childhood episode we examine the role of student activism in the face of the climate crisis with student activist Alexis Benns, and look at how we can reimagine schools that honour the histories of Indigenous, Black and Racialized populations with educator and scholar Dr Vidya Shah. We take a look at the myth of neutrality in curriculum development and ask can we really have climate change without system change?
This Republic of Childhood episode spotlights Tim Wynne-Jones, two-time winner of the Governor General's Award, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award and the Arthur Ellis Award.
In his latest collection of stories, War at the Snow White Motel, Rex and his family are vacationing in Vermont. A thoughtless act launches him into war with an older teenager at their motel, but a much bigger conflict — the Vietnam War — looms large on the horizon.
Ant wants to join the #FridaysForFuture movement — and impressing the new girl at school is only one good reason why. Joseph and Danny are determined to right an old wrong, no matter the consequences. Michel takes a road trip to spot a rare bird, and along the way learns what his father is really afraid of. Robin has to battle her anxiety when her great-grandfather sends her in search of an old stuffed toy with a storied past. Walker is home for the summer, in time to help his little sister expose a local company’s dubious environmental practices. A boy can’t figure out why the class bully won’t leave him alone — it’s not anything he could have foreseen.
Tim Wynne-Jones brilliantly captures pivotal moments small and large as these characters fight for understanding, courage and a better future. This new collection features six brand-new stories and three that have been previously published.
In this Republic of Childhood episode we take a look at education and social mobility. Have we really transcended class in our school system?
In Moving: A Memoir of Education and Social Mobility, renowned professor, government adviser, and global change agent Andy Hargreaves shares candid, poignant and occasionally hilarious personal experiences of social mobility. Deeply revealing, emotionally direct, and intellectually insightful, the book begins in 1950s Northwest England and takes readers up to Hargreaves's university education in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hargreaves openly shares how class movement has affected him throughout life, links his narrative to classic and contemporary research and realities, and calls on society to reverse the increasing levels of social immobility and inequity worldwide.
November 20 is Universal Children’s Day and the 30th anniversary of the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child. To celebrate we are launching our fourth Republic of Childhood season with an exciting program of interviews of writers by students, conversations with young activists and innovative educators weighing in on amplifying the voices and concerns of children and youth.
This episode of the podcast celebrates two of Canada’s most acclaimed writers for young readers. Governor General’s Award winner Kenneth Oppel takes questions from Ottawa students about his latest, Hatch, book two of the Bloom Trilogy and Governor General's Award winner Deborah Ellis discusses her new novel, The Greats, with Alan Cumyn, winner of winner of the Mr. Christie’s Book Award for children’s literature.
CBC's Idil Mussa hosts Eternity Martis and Tessa McWatt. This episode of the podcast takes a hard look at racial belonging in contemporary Canada. For too long the conversation on race in Canada has been framed by issues south of the border. Here, we examine our own culture and some of the ongoing barriers to equity and inclusion.
They Said This Would Be Fun: Race, Campus Life, and Growing Up by Eternity Martis is a powerful memoir about what it's like to be a student of colour on a predominantly white campus. Using her award-winning reporting skills, Eternity connects her own experience to the systemic issues plaguing students today. It's a memoir of pain, but also resilience.
Interrogating our ideas of race through the lens of her own multi-racial identity, critically acclaimed novelist Tessa McWatt turns her eye on herself, her body and this world in a powerful new work of non-fiction. Shame on Me is a personal exploration of history and identity, colour and desire, from a writer who, having been plagued with confusion about her race all her life, has at last found kinship and solidarity in story.
Join us for a taste of two remarkable historical novels that are rooted in the past, but speak to our current preoccupations and challenges. While this year of pandemic and social unrest feels unprecedented, we are not the first to live in interesting times. From Shakespear’s England in 1580 to Mexico in the 1960s, much of what we are facing echoes throughout history.
Peter Schneider hosts Maggie O’Farrell, winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and J.F. Martel hosts Sarah Xerar Murphy, winner of the New Brunswick Book Award.
Hamnet & Judith by Maggie O’Farrell is a luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a hypnotic recreation of the story that inspired one of the greatest literary masterpieces of all time.
Itzel I: A Tlatelolco Awakening, the first of two-part novel, by Sarah Xerar Murphy, tells the story of three disparate characters swept up in the drama of the Mexican student movement of 1968. Broad in scope and exuberant in style in the best tradition of Latin American literature, this book roots its readers in the ebullience of Mexico's daily life and language, even as they are made to confront the horrors of history, to examine the difficulties of friendship and family.
Our Remembrance Day podcast features Mark Sutcliffe in conversation with Canadian historian Tim Cook on how World War Two has been remembered and taught over the past 75 years, and CBC's Laurence Wall in conversation with Scott Anderson on his bestselling look at the early years of the Cold War and the CIA's covert battles against communism. Both authors examine military history and its role in our culture today.
Tim Cook’s The Fight for History examines how Canadians framed and reframed the war experience over time. Just as the importance of the battle of Vimy Ridge to Canadians rose, fell, and rose again over a 100-year period, the meaning of Canada's Second World War followed a similar pattern. This is the story of how Canada has talked about the war in the past, how we tried to bury it, and how it was restored. This is the history of a constellation of changing ideas, with many historical twists and turns, and a series of fascinating actors and events.
From Scott Anderson, the bestselling author of Lawrence in Arabia, comes a gripping history of the early years of the Cold War, the CIA's covert battles against communism, and the tragic consequences which still affect the world today The Quiet Americans chronicles the exploits of four spies: Michael Burke, a charming former football star fallen on hard times; Frank Wisner, the scion of a wealthy Southern family; Peter Sichel, a sophisticated German Jew who escaped the Nazis; and Edward Lansdale, a brilliant ad executive. The Quiet Americans is the story of these four men. It is also the story of how the United States, at the very pinnacle of its power, managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Emma Donoghue hosts a conversation with editor and author Lennie Goodings about her book, A Bite of the Apple: A Life with Books, Writers and Virago.
Part memoir, part literary history, and part reflection on more than forty years of feminist publishing, A Bite of the Apple is a story of idealism and pragmatism, solidarity and individual ambition, of challenges met and the battles not yet won—and, above all, a steadfast celebration of the making and reading of books.
Following the chronology of the press where she has worked nearly since its founding, Lennie Goodings tells the story of the group of visionary publishers and writers who have made Virago one of the most important and influential publishers in the English-speaking world. Like the books she has edited and published—by writers ranging from Maya Angelou and Margaret Atwood to Sarah Waters and Naomi Wolf—Goodings’s contribution to the genre breaks new ground as well, telling a story of women in the world of work, offering much needed balance to the male-dominated genre of publishing memoirs, and chronicling a critical aspect of the history of feminism: how women began to assume control over the production of their own books.
Poet Nina Jane Drystek hosts conversations with two incredible poets, both published by Vancouver’s Arsenal Pulp Press.
Render is Sachiko Murakami's intimate and unflinching poetic memoir. In it, she travels the non-linear path of addiction to recovery, how it shifts over time, and what happens when it is translated through poetry. Looking beyond the straightforward, happily-ever-after narrative, Murakami wades through the aftermath of her addiction and questions what happens to trauma when it is put down on the page - and all the ways in which it can be rendered.
In The Gospel of Breaking, Jillian Christmas extracts from family history, queer lineage, and the political landscape of a racialized life to create a rich, softly defiant collection of poems.
Christmas draws a circle around the things she calls "holy": the family line that cannot find its root but survived to fill the skies with radiant flesh; the body, broken and unbroken and broken and new again; the lover lost, the friend lost, and the loss itself; and the hands that hold them all with brilliant, tender care.
This episode features a conversation between two of our most innovative and interesting authors and poets. Join them for a deep dive on the craft and the process at work in their most recent publications.
Inquisitive and expansive, Like a Boy but Not a Boy explores author andrea bennett’s experiences with gender expectations, being a non-binary parent, and the sometimes funny and sometimes difficult task of living in a body. The book's fourteen essays also delve incisively into the interconnected themes of mental illness, mortality, creative work, class, and bike mechanics (apparently you can learn a lot about yourself through truing a wheel).
John Elizabeth Stintzi’s unforgettable debut poetry collection, Junebat, grapples with the pain of uncertainty on the path towards becoming. Set during the year Stintzi lived in deep isolation in Jersey City, NJ, these poems map the depression the poet struggled with as they questioned and came to grips with their gender identity. Through the invention of the Junebat — a contradictory, evolving, ever-perplexing creature — Stintzi is able to create a self-defined space within the poems where they can reside comfortably, beyond the firm boundaries of the gender binary or the plethora of identities gathered under the queer umbrella.
A limited number of signed books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Join Sean Wilson in conversation with MR Carey and Hattie Klotz in conversation with Lauren Buekes.
Everything that lives hates us: That’s the reality M.R. Carey is exploring in The Rampart Trilogy. The award-winning author of the Lucifer comics and The Girl With All The Gifts returns with The Book of Koli. Beyond the walls of the small village of Mythen Rood lies an unrecognizable landscape. A place where overgrown forests are filled with choker trees and deadly seeds that will kill you where you stand. Koli has lived in Mythen Rood his entire life. He believes the first rule of survival is that you don't venture too far beyond the walls. He's wrong.
Most of the men are dead. Three years after the pandemic known as The Manfall, governments still hold and life continues–but a world run by women isn't always a better place. Children of Men meets The Handmaid's Tale in Afterland, a blend of psychological suspense, American noir, and science fiction from South Africa’s Lauren Beukes.
Join Sean Wilson in conversation with David A. Robertson and Kate Heartfield in conversation with Derek Kunsken.
Narnia meets traditional Indigenous stories of the sky and constellations in The Barren Grounds, an epic middle grade fantasy series from award-winning author David Robertson. Morgan and Eli, two Indigenous children forced away from their families and communities, are brought together in a foster home in Winnipeg, Manitoba. They each feel disconnected, from their culture and each other–until they find a secret place, walled off in an unfinished attic bedroom. A portal opens to another reality.
Life can exist anywhere. And anywhere there is life, there is home. The House of Styx takes readers 250 years before the events in Derek Kunsken’s bestseller, The Quantum Magician. In the swirling clouds of Venus, the families of la colonie live on floating plant-like trawlers, salvaging what they can in the fierce acid rain and crackling storms. Outside is dangerous, but humankind’s hold on the planet is fragile and they spend most of their days simply surviving. But Venus carries its own secrets, too.
CBC’s Olivia Robinson hosts a conversation with Tara Henley about the modern world--and why so many feel disillusioned by it.
In 2016, journalist Tara Henley was at the top of her game working in Canadian media. She had traveled the world, from Soweto to Bangkok and Borneo to Brooklyn, interviewing authors and community leaders, politicians and Hollywood celebrities. But when she started getting chest pains at her desk in the newsroom, none of that seemed to matter.
The health crisis--not cardiac, it turned out, but anxiety--forced her to step off the media treadmill and examine her life and the stressful twenty-first century world around her.
Part memoir, part travelogue, and part investigation, Lean Out tracks her journey from the heart of the connected city to the fringe communities that surround it. From early retirement enthusiasts in urban British Columbia to moneyless men in rural Ireland, Henley uncovers a parallel track in which everyday citizens are quietly dropping out of the mainstream and reclaiming their lives from overwork. Underlying these disparate movements is a rejection of consumerism, a growing appetite for social contribution, and a quest for meaningful connection in this era of extreme isolation and loneliness.
This episode celebrates the thrill of a good mystery. Our three guest authors have all spent a lot of time thinking about where to hide the bodies and how best to through us off the scent. It’s a good thing they are using those powers to delight and entertain!. CBC's Lucy van Oldenbarneveld interviews Katie Tallo and Scott Thornley and Andrew Pyper interviews Amy Stuart.
Dark August is the internationally bestselling debut of Ottawa’s own Katie Tallo. It’s a page-turning mystery about a young woman haunted by her tragic past, who returns to her hometown and discovers that there might be more to her police detective mother’s death—and last case—than she ever could have imagined.
Amy Stuart, the bestselling author of Still Mine and Still Water, returns with Still Here. PI Clare O’Dey is on the hunt for two missing persons. Little does she know she’s the one being hunted. Malcolm is gone. And no one knows where or why. As she searches for the man who helped her build her career as a private eye, Clare discovers that many women are in grave danger. And she is among them.
Hamilton’s Scott Thornley returns with Vantage Point, the fourth suspense-filled instalment of his critically acclaimed MacNeice Mysteries. This time, MacNeice and his team on the hunt for a sophisticated serial killer who draws his inspiration from classic works of art.
Do we ever really tell the truth, even to ourselves? This episode features three novels that examine the lies and truths at the heart of our most intimate relationships:
Seductive and tension-filled, Polar Vortex by Giller Prize nominee Shani Mootoo is a story of secrets, deceptions, and revenge. It asks if we ever free from our pasts? Do we deserve to be?
A spellbinding, down-the-rabbit-hole tale about loneliness and belonging, creativity and agency, and female friendship and desire, Mona Awad’s acclaimed novel Bunny explores what happens when an outsider is suddenly invited into a clique of unbearably twee rich girls.
Seven, by Lambda Literary Award-winner Farzana Doctor is about inheritance and resistance that tests the balance between kinship and the fight against customs that harm us. When Sharifa accompanies her husband on a marriage-saving trip to India in 2016, she finds her family on opposite sides of the debate on khatna, an age-old ritual of female genital cutting.
All history is a kind of fiction, and the best stories are often built around real people and places, so what can we learn from invented truths and our relationship with imagination and investigation?
This episode features Helen Humphreys in conversation with Frances Boyle and Will Ferguson in conversation with artsfile.ca's Peter Robb.
Based on a true story, Rabbit Foot Bill by Helen Humphreys is about a lonely boy in a prairie town who befriends a vagrant in 1947 and then witnesses a shocking murder. Being with Bill is everything to young Leonard, so his shock is absolute when he witnesses Bill commit a sudden violent act and loses him to prison. Fifteen years on, and reunited with Bill, he becomes fixated on discovering what happened on that fateful day.
From Scotiabank Giller Prize–winner Will Ferguson, comes The Finder, a beguiling and wildly original tale about the people, places, and things that are lost and found in our world. Both an epic literary adventure and an escape into a darkly thrilling world of deceit and its rewards, this novel asks: How far would you be willing to go to recover the things you’ve left behind?
Two of the seasons most anticipated releases explore the inner lives of women, and the realities we too-often try to ignore. Resentment and resilience, rage and regret: There is turbulence under the surface, unacknowledged causes and effects that reverberate through lives.
This episode features Rebecca Watson and Annabel Lyon in conversation with Author and educator Julie S. Lalonde.
Fiercely moving and slyly profound, little scratch by Rebecca Watson reveals a young woman's every thought over the course of one deceptively ordinary day. Relayed in interweaving columns that chart the feedback loop of memory, the senses, and modern distractions with wit and precision, our narrator becomes increasingly anxious as the day moves on: Is she overusing the heart emoji? Isn't drinking eight glasses of water a day supposed to fix everything? Why is the etiquette of the women's bathroom so fraught? How does she define rape? And why can't she stop scratching?
Centred on two sets of sisters whose lives are braided together when tragedy changes them forever, Annabel Lyon’s, Consent, is a startling, moving, thought-provoking novel on the complexities of familial duty and on how love can become entangled with guilt, resentment and regret.
Join us in celebration of the art and craft of the short story. How do these acclaimed authors distill the human experience into such a concentrated form? How can they illumine so much of live’s ambiguity with so few words?
This episode features Frances Boyle in conversation with artsfile.ca's Peter Robb and Rhonda Douglas with David Bergen and Souvankham Thammavongsa.
Following men and boys bewildered by their circumstances and swayed by desire, and featuring a novella about a young woman who rejects the laws of her cloistered Mennonite community, the latest from Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner David Bergen deftly renders complex moral ambiguities and asks what it means to be lost—and how we might be found:. The short stories in Here the Dark explore the spaces between doubt and belief, evil and good, obscurity and light.
In Seeking Shade, the debut short story collection from poet, editor and author Frances Boyle, nuanced characters endure trauma, evolution and epiphany as they face challenges, make decisions, and suffer the inevitable consequences.
Named one of the best books of April by The New York Times, Salon, The Millions, and Vogue, and featuring stories that have appeared in Harper's, Granta, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review, How to Pronounce Knife from O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa establishes her as an essential new voice.
This episode features Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm in conversation with Michelle Good about her new novel, Five Little Indians.
The annual Orange Shirt Day on September 30th opens the door to global conversation on all aspects of Residential Schools. It is an opportunity to create meaningful discussion about the effects of Residential Schools and the legacy they have left behind. A discussion all Canadians can tune into and create bridges with each other for reconciliation.
Taken from their families when they are very small and sent to a remote, church-run residential school, Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie are barely out of childhood when they are finally released after years of detention. With compassion and insight, Five Little Indians by Michelle Good chronicles the desperate quest of these residential school survivors to come to terms with their past and, ultimately, find a way forward.
A limited number of signed books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Is there anything more mysterious and more fundamental to our lives than the human brain? But do any of us really understand how our brains work, where consciousness comes from or how best to deal with our unique quirks of perception?
This episode features Stephen Brockwell in conversation with neuroscientist David Eagleman and Nina Jane Drystek in conversation with autistic self advocate and essayist Sarah Kurchak.
Sarah Kurchak is autistic. She hasn’t let that get in the way of pursuing her dream to become a writer, or to find love, but she has let it get in the way of being in the same room with someone chewing food loudly, and of cleaning her bathroom sink. In I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder, Kurchak examines the Byzantine steps she took to become “an autistic success story,” how the process almost ruined her life and how she is now trying to recover.
In his new bestseller, Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain, best-selling author and neuroscientist, David Eagleman, takes us on a thrilling journey of discovery. The brain is often portrayed as an organ with different regions dedicated to specific tasks. But that textbook model is wrong. The brain is a dynamic system, constantly modifying its own circuitry to match the demands of the environment and the body in which it finds itself.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Some think of history as something distinct from the here and now, but for bettor or worse, history is always with us. Clearly, some history needs to be confronted if we are ever going to learn from it.
This episode features Shaena Lambert in conversation with Peter Schneider and Francesca Ekwuyasi in conversation with Catherine Hernandez.
Inspired by Petra Kelly, the original Green Party leader and political activist who fought for the planet in 1980s Germany, Shaena Lambert brings us a captivating new novel about a woman who changed history and transformed environmental politics--and who, like many history-changing women, has been largely erased. Petra is an exploration of love, jealousy, and the power of social change.
Francesca Ekwuyasi's debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread, is an intergenerational saga about three Nigerian women, a story of choices and their consequences, of motherhood, of the malleable line between the spirit and the mind, of finding new homes and mending old ones, of voracious appetites, of queer love, of friendship, faith, and above all, family.
Mark Sutcliffe hosts a conversation with Darrell Fox, Terry’s younger brother, who joined Terry and his friend Doug Alward, on the Marathon of Hope in Saint John, New Brunswick, in May 1980, at the age of 17.
To mark the 40th anniversary of the Marathon of Hope, Forever Terry: A Legacy in Letters recounts the inspiration, dedication, and perseverance that Terry Fox embodied, and gives voice to an icon whose example spoke much louder than his words.
Comprising 40 letters from 40 contributors, and edited by Terry’s younger brother Darrell on behalf of the Fox family, Forever Terry pays tribute to Terry's legacy, as seen through the eyes of celebrated Canadians ranging from Margaret Atwood, Bobby Orr, Perdita Felicien, Jann Arden, and Christine Sinclair, to those who accompanied Terry on his run, Terry Fox Run organizers, participants, supporters, and cancer champions. Appearing alongside never-before-seen photos of their hero, their reflections reveal connections that readers would never have expected, and offer a glimpse into the way goodness and greatness inspire more of the same.
Forever Terry is a testament to the influence one brave man has had on the shape of Canadian dreams, ambitions, and commitment to helping others. Author proceeds support the Terry Fox Foundation, which has raised over $800 million for cancer research.
We seem to avoid thinking about mortality, or talking about loss, but it is an unavoidable fact that we all face the loss of a loved one, and will each confront that truth in different ways. If grief is unavoidable, what is the best way to make peace with it?
Part Two of Living With Dying features Sheree Fitch in conversation with Neil Wilson, and Lorna Crozier in conversation with CBC’s Sandra Abma.
In the wake of her son's unexpected death, author and storyteller Sheree Fitch wrote it all down, penning an honest, lyrical memoir with words to stir heart. You Won't Always Be This Sad invites readers on a journey through grief towards hope, guided by the immeasurable depths of a mother's love.
Told with unflinching honesty and fierce tenderness, Through the Garden by Lorna Crozier is a deeply affecting portrait of a long partnership and a clear-eyed account of the impact of a serious illness, writing as consolation, and the enduring significance of poetry. When Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane met at a poetry workshop in 1976, they had no idea that they would go on to write more than forty books between them, balancing their careers with their devotion to each other, and to their beloved cats, for decades. Then, in January 2017, their life together changed unexpectedly when Patrick became seriously ill. At once a spirited account of the past and a poignant reckoning with the present, it is, above all, an extraordinary and unforgettable love story.
A limited number of signed books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
We seem to avoid thinking about mortality, or talking about loss, but it is an unavoidable fact that we all face the loss of a loved one, and will each confront that truth in different ways. If grief is unavoidable, what is the best way to make peace with it?
Part One of Living With Dying features Dakshana Bascaramurty in conversation with CBC’s Idill Mussa, and Anita Lahey in conversation with Ellen Chang-Richardson.
This is Not the End of Me by Dakshana Bascaramurty is the moving, inspiring story of a young husband and father who, when diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of thirty-three, sets out to build a legacy for his infant son. Layton Reid was a globe-trotting, risk-taking, sunshine-addicted bachelor--then came a melanoma diagnosis. Cancer startled him out of his arrested development--he returned home to Halifax to work as a wedding photographer--and remission launched him into a new, passionate life as a husband and father-to-be. When the melanoma returned, now at Stage IV, Layton and his family put all their stock into a punishing alternative therapy, hoping for a cure. This Is Not the End of Me recounts Layton's three-year journey as he tried desperately to stay alive for his young son, Finn, and then found purpose in preparing Finn for a world without him.
Equal parts humorous and heartbreaking, The Last Goldfish by Anita Lahey is a poignant memoir of youth, friendship, and the impermanence of life. Anita and Louisa, instant friends in grade nine, navigate the wilds of 1980s suburban adolescence against the backdrop of dramatic world events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. They make carpe diem their manifesto and hatch ambitious plans. But when Louisa’s life takes a shocking turn, into hospital wards, medical tests, and treatments, a new possibility confronts them, one that alters, with devastating finality, the prospect of the future for them both.
We sometimes think of history as something distant, but the more we explore the past, the more we see the present reflected, the lessons learned and the lessons we are still trying to get right.
This episode features Aislinn Hunter in conversation with Sean Wilson, and Gil Adamson in conversation with Carleton's Susan Birkwood.
The Certainties, by Aislinn Hunter is a moving and transformative blend of historical and speculative fiction--a novel that shows us what it means to bear witness, and to attend to those who seek refuge, past and present. In 1940, as the shadow of war lengthens over Europe, three mysterious travelers enter a village in Spain. Meanwhile, in the 1980s, a woman named Pia seeks solitude on a remote island in the Atlantic, where she works at an inn and reflects on her chaotic childhood.
Set against the backdrop of a distant war raging in Europe and a rapidly changing landscape in the West, Gil Adamson’s follow-up to her award-winning debut, The Outlander, is a vivid historical novel that draws from the epic tradition and a literary Western brimming with a cast of unforgettable characters touched with humour and loss, and steeped in the wild of the natural world. William Moreland is in mid-flight. After nearly twenty years, the notorious thief, known as the Ridgerunner, has returned.
A limited number of signed books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
The Ottawa International Writers Festival is supported by generous individuals like you. Please consider subscribing to our newsletter and making a donation to support our programming and children’s literacy initiatives.
Our second episode is all about Thriving and Surviving. Novelist Farzana Doctor speaks with actor and writer Joanne Vannicola about her book All We Knew But Couldn't Say. From our video series we have included a reading by Billy-Ray Belcourt's latest work A History of My Brief Body. Followed by Natasha Coldevin and Elaina Martin discussing Elaina's memoir Dyke, the first in a three book series.
Why do we love scary stories? Has the pandemic changed the way we think about horror? Are we more or less willing to take a fictional walk into the darkness during these difficult times?
In our inaugural podcast, Artistic Director, Sean Wilson speaks with three talented authors. Two of the three books- Stephen Graham Jones' The Only Good Indians and Andrew Pyper's The Residence, would best be described as horror novels or thrillers and one, the story collection Cascade by Craig Davidson is not, but Craig is no stranger to horror which he writes under the bestselling pseudonym Nick Cutter.
Available on your favorite podcast platform - iTunes, Spotify and Stitcher - SUBSCRIBE today!