Writers Out Loud series
2010 Writers Out Loud
The 2010 series will be posted in January 2010.
2009 events, come and gone...
- D.G. JONES, hosted by Kenneth Radu
- Saturday July 11, 2009 3pm
- Studio Georgeville: 20 Carré Copp Georgeville, QC
D.G. JONES(Douglas Gordon) was a founding editor of ellipse, the review for the translation of Canadian and Quebec poetry. In 1977, he won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for Under the Thunder the Flowers Light Up the Earth. He won the GG again in 1992, this time for his translation of Normand de Bellefeuille’s Categorics, One, Two, and Three, and he won the QSPELL Poetry Prize 1989, 1993, and 1995. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2007. The Stream Exposed With All Its Stones: Collected Poems is due out in September, 2008 (Véhicule Press).
Host KENNETH RADU is the author of eleven books, including three story collections, four novels, three volumes of poetry, and one memoir. Of his prose works, The Cost of Living was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award. He has twice won the QSPELL Prize for Fiction, for A Private Performance and Distant Relations, which was shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award. His most recent book is Strange and Familiar Places (Véhicule Press, 1999).
- ANN CHARNEY, hosted by Guy Rodgers
- Thursday June 4, 2009 7:30pm
- Eleanor London Côte Saint-Luc Public Library: 5851 Cavendish Blvd., Côte Saint-Luc
ANN CHARNEY was born in Poland and raised in Montreal. She is a novelist, essayist, and journalist, who has an MA in French literature from McGill University and a license dès lettres from the Sorbonne in Paris. Her work has been published in Canada and the U.S., as well as in France, Germany, and Italy. She has won two National Magazine Awards, the Chatelaine Fiction Prize, and the Canadian Authors’ Association Prize, and has been named an officer of the French Order of Arts and Letters. Her most recent book is Distantly Related to Freud (Cormorant, 2008).
Host GUY RODGERS is Past President of Playwrights' Workshop Montreal (PWM) and was president of both FEWQ and QSPELL when they merged to become the Quebec Writers' Federation (QWF). In the late 80s he served as Executive Director of the newly created Quebec Drama Federation (QDF) and in the early 90s was appointed to the founding Board of le Conseil des Arts et des Letters du Québec (CALQ). He has also served on boards for le Conseil Québécois du Théâtre (CQT) and the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival. In 2005 he received the Quebec Writers' Federation's Community Award for leadership in building communities among artists.
- CLAIRE HOLDEN ROTHMAN, hosted by Kit Brennan
- Tuesday May 12, 2009 7:30pm
- Knowlton, Location TBA
CLAIRE HOLDEN ROTHMAN is a Montreal writer and translator. She has published two collections of stories, Salad Days (Cormorant 1990) and Black Tulips (Oberon 1999). Her novel The Heart Specialist, will be published by Cormorant in the spring of 2009. Her translations include Philippe Aubert de Gaspé’s Le chercheur de trésors (The Influence of a Book), which won the John Glassco Translation Award, Esther Delisle’s The Traitor and the Jew and all kinds of commercial work. Her specialty is adapting shows into English for television.
Host KIT BRENNAN is a faculty member of the Concordia University Theatre Department. Her plays have been published and produced across Canada; they include Tiger's Heart (G. Gordon Shillingford), The Invisibility of Eileen, Hunger Striking (Playwrights’ Coop, Toronto), Spring Planting (NuAge), Having (NuAge, 1999), and Magpie (NuAge, 1999).
- NEIL BISSOONDATH
- Friday May 1, 2009, 7:30pm
- Morrin Centre: 44 chaussée des Écossais, Quebec City QC
NEIL BISSOONDATH has won many prizes for fiction and non-fiction, including the QWF's Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction for Doing the Heart Good and The Unyielding Clamour of the Night. A finalist for the Governor-General’s Literary Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize, Bissoondath came to prominence in 1985 with the publication of Digging Up the Mountains, a book of short stories, and A Casual Brutality, a novel set in the Caribbean. His 1994 polemic, Selling Illusions: the Cult of Multiculturalism, stirred controversy when it questioned conventional Canadian thinking on the subject. His most recent book is The Soul of All Great Designs (Cormorant, 2008)
- ARJUN BASU, J. R. CARPENTER, SALEEMA NAWAZ
- Thursday April 30, 2009, 7:30pm
- Eleanor London Côte Saint-Luc Public Library: 5851 Cavendish Blvd., Côte Saint-Luc
ARJUN BASU was born and raised in Montreal. He was editor-in-chief of enRoute Magazine from 2001 to 2007. His stories have appeared in publications such as Matrix, The Moosehead Anthology and in AWOL: Tales for Travel Inspired Minds. His first book, Squishy (DC Books, 2008) is a collection of short stories.
J. R. CARPENTER is a two-time winner of the CBC/QWF Quebec Short Story Competition and a Web Art Finalist in the Drunken Boat Pan Literary Awards 2006. Her short fiction has appeared in Le livre de chevet, In Other Words, Lust for Life, Short Stuff, Geist, Matrix, the New Quarterly, and Blood & Aphorisms. Her first novel is Words the Dog Knows, published by Conundrum in Fall 2008. A fellow of Yaddo, Ucross and the Vermont Studio Center, she currently serves as President of the Board of Directors of OBORO Gallery in Montreal.
SALEEMA NAWAZ's fiction has appeared in journals including Prairie Fire, Grain, The New Quarterly, and PRISM international, and she is an alumnus of the Writing Studio at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Her novella "The White Dress" took second place in the Malahat Review's novella contest and won the inaugural Robert Kroetsch Award for Best Creative Thesis at the University of Manitoba. Her first book, Mother Superior, was a finalist for the QWF's McAuslan First Book Prize, and one of the stories in the collection, "My Three Girls," won the 2008 Writers’ Trust of Canada / McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize.
- RAWI HAGE
- Tuesday April 21, 2009, 7pm
- Librairie Le Chêne: 55 rue Lambton, Ormstown QC
RAWI HAGE was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war. He immigrated to Canada in 1992.
He is a writer, a visual artist, and a curator. His writings have appeared in Fuse Magazine, Mizna, Jouvert, The Toronto Review, Montreal Serai, and Al-Jadid. His visual works have been shown in galleries and museums around the world including the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Musée de la civilisation de Québec.
Rawi's debut novel, De Niro's Game won the QWF's McAuslan First Book Prize and the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction in 2006, and rights to the book have been sold around the world. In 2008, it won the International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award.
His current novel Cockroach won the QWF's Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was also shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General's Literary Award, and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
- ASA BOXER & KATIA GRUBISIC, hosted by Jennifer Boire
- Tuesday September 29, 2009 5:30pm
- Casa Del Popolo: 4873 boul. St-Laurent
ASA BOXER’s poems, articles and reviews have appeared in London Magazine, Arc, Books in Canada, Maisonneuve and CNQ. He won first prize in the 2005 CBC/enRoute poetry competition for his poem cycle called The Workshop, and the 2008 Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry for his first book, The Mechanical Bird (Véhicule Press, 2007).
KATIA GRUBISIC’s poems, short stories, translations and reviews have appeared in numerous periodicals, including Arc, ellipse, The Fiddlehead, The Globe and Mail and Grain. She edited the Montreal issue of The New Quarterly. Her work has been short-listed for the CBC Literary Awards, the Descant / Winston Collins Prize and the National Magazine Awards. Her first book is What if red ran out (Goose Lane, 2008).
Host JENNIFER BOIRE is a Montreal poet whose book, Little Mother, was published by Hochelaga Press in 1997. She has written book reviews for Prairie Fire, and led writing workshops for women on the theme of Writing the Body. She released a chapbook, A Place of Trees (Over the Moon Press, 2003) and a mini-CD of recorded poems, Holding the Song (Wiredonwords, 2005).
- JEAN-BENOÌT NADEAU & JULIE BARLOW
- Thursday October 15, 7pm
- Eleanor London Côte Saint-Luc Public Library: 5851 Cavendish Blvd., Côte Saint-Luc
JEAN-BENOÌT NADEAU has published five books and 900 magazine articles, and won 33 awards and mentions in journalism. He writes books with his wife and colleague, Julie Barlow. Their study of the French, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong (Sourcebooks, Chicago 2003) has been published in four languages. Their latest book, The Story of French (Knopf Canada, 2006), won the QWF's 2007 Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction.
JULIE BARLOW’s articles have appeared in magazines and newspapers in Canada, the US and Europe. She won four Honorary Mentions at Canada’s National Magazine Awards and the Quebec Magazine Awards. In 2003 she published Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong with Jean-Benoît Nadeau, to international acclaim. Barlow & Nadeau’s latest book, The Story of French (Knopf Canada, 2006), won the QWF's 2007 Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction.
- T.F. RIGELHOF & IAN MCGILLIS
- Thursday October 22, 7:30pm
- Westmount Library: 4574 Sherbrooke West
Two of English Canada’s foremost book reviewers, T.F. Rigelhof (The Globe and Mail) and Ian McGillis (The Montreal Gazette) meet face to face to discuss Terry’s forthcoming (Spring 2010 from Cormorant) book Hooked on Canadian Books: A Reader’s Guide to the Good, the Very Good & the Even Better Novels of 1984–2009. As he notes in his “Introduction,” although he’s written both fiction and non-fiction and reviewed many different kinds of books, Rigelhof is “first, last, and always a reader of contemporary fiction – especially Canadian novels.” Hooked on Canadian Books is dedicated to Judy Mappin and the staff of the lamented Double Hook Bookstore and includes his account of the place it occupied in shaping his reading.
Aislin cartoon reprinted with permission of the artist.
QWF gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts.
