In partnership with Writers’ Trust of Canada, we have created a series of dialogues exploring the last 75 years of writing in Canada. Each session brings you a contemporary writer in conversation with an important work of fiction or theatre that has offered a key moment of definition, change or challenge. Together, we get to ask questions around how major books can help shape and evolve deeper understandings of our culture.

This session covers The Wars by Timothy Findley. Published in 1978, this groundbreaking modern classic is one of the most innovative and highly acclaimed fictional accounts of Word War I, told through the perspective of Robert Ross, a sensitive nineteen-year-old Canadian officer who went to war—The War to End All Wars. He found himself in the nightmare world of trench warfare, of mud and smoke, of chlorine gas and rotting corpses. In this world gone mad, Robert Ross performed a last desperate act to declare his commitment to life in the midst of death.

Presenter: Charlie Foran
Moderator: Catherine Graham

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