Join Didier Leclair on August 11 at 6pm to celebrate the release of the English edition of his book Toronto, I Love You (Mawenzi House), translated by Elaine Kennedy! The author and translator will be joined in conversation by the writer Paul Savoie.
The free Toronto Lit Up book launch will take place at the Debates Room (#2034) in the University of Toronto’s historic Hart House building. Books will be for sale on site, courtesy of Another Story Bookshop. Light refreshments and drinks will be provided by in-house catering services.
In Toronto, I Love You, Raymond Dossougbé flees the misery of his home town in Benin, arrives in Toronto, and is immediately charmed by the city. He sees it as a place of freedom and light, a sanctuary where he, like so many others, can begin anew. But as he becomes familiar with the city and its inhabitants, he realizes that his Afro-Caribbean roommates look like him but aren’t his brothers. He discovers a free community that is mentally shackled, an underground network that is stuck in the past, immigrants who are unable to adapt. He sees deep poverty, extreme wealth, and the consequences of police brutality. Eventually he finds his bearings in this new world and comes to a better understanding of himself and the colourful characters around him.
The French edition of Toronto, I Love You won the Prix Trillium when it first came out in 2000.
Special guests:
Elaine Kennedy has enjoyed a lengthy and diversified career as a professional translator and editor. A native of Toronto, she studied English literature, French language and translation in North America and Europe. She has worked as a translator in the academic and cultural sectors. The co-winner of the 3Macs carte blanche Prize and a finalist for the Toronto Book Award and the International Book Award, she presently devotes her full time to literary translation.
Paul Savoie is one of Canada’s most prolific bilingual writers. Originally from Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, he has lived in Ontario since the early 1970s. He has written more than 30 books, including several collections of poetry, stories, and translations. His poetry books won the Trillium Book Award twice. Involved in the arts community for more than 25 years, Savoie also composes music for piano.
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 and June 2022, Toronto Lit Up has presented 137 events to launch 161 books by 236 Toronto authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
Join Emily Saso on Thursday, September 8 at 6pm ET at Tranzac Club to celebrate the launch of Nine Dash Line (Freehand Books, September 2022)!
The free Toronto Lit Up event will feature an interview with the author from Becky Toyne. Snacks are free, and drinks will be served by the Tranzac Club. Please review the venue’s COVID policy here. Masks are required except between bites of food and drinks of drinks!
Nine Dash Line is a thrilling novel about two people stranded under mysterious circumstances in the South China Sea, battling the memories of the crimes that haunt them. Books will be for sale on site, courtesy of Ben McNally Books.
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 and June 2022, Toronto Lit Up has presented 137 events to launch 161 books by 236 Toronto authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
Join Neil Besner on June 6 at 6:30pm ET at Arts & Letters Club to celebrate the launch of his memoir, Fishing with Tardelli (ECW Press May 2022)!
Ricardo Sternberg, poet and retired professor at U of T, joins Neil Besner in a panel discussion about his memoir and their shared hometown, Rio de Janiero, hosted by Ruth Panofsky, professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. Enjoy performances by Brazilian musician, Carlos Augusto Cardozo Filho. Light refreshments will be provided. Book signing with sales by Type Books.
A literary meditation on memory, time, love, and loss, Fishing with Tardelli is a son’s meditation on four parental figures — mother, father, stepfather, and his Brazilian fishing companion — as he locates them on three home grounds: Rio de Janeiro, Toronto, and Montreal, and memory’s story about time.
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 and January 2022, Toronto Lit Up has produced 128 events that launched 152 books by 226 local authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
Join Terri Favro on June 2 at 6:30pm ET at See-Scape Sci-Fi Bar & Gaming Cafe to celebrate the launch of her sci-fi novel, The Sisters Sputnik (ECW Press, May 2022)!
Hosted by author Eufemia Fantetti, the free Toronto Lit Up event will feature actors performing a dramatic reading from The Sisters Sputnik with Terri Favro. Attendees are encouraged to dress in cosplay as their favourite sci-fi or comic book character! Light refreshments will be provided. A cash bar will also be available.
In the sequel to Sputnik’s Children, The Sisters Sputnik takes ‘undocumented time immigrant’ Debbie Reynolds Biondi and her apprentice Unicorn Girl on a wild ride through alternate worlds, into a possible future where robots rule and humans are banished to the past. It’s an odyssey wrapped in a love story, set in a near-future of artificial people. You can get your copy of the book from Queen Books here.
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 and January 2022, Toronto Lit Up has produced 128 events that launched 152 books by 226 local authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
Join Toronto Lit Up and Simon & Schuster Canada on Tuesday, April 5, 2022 at 6:30pm ET to celebrate the launch of Sonya Singh’s book Sari, Not Sari. The in-person event will take place at Arta Gallery, 14 Distillery Lane in Toronto.
Sari, Not Sari is a delightful debut rom-com that follows the adventures of a woman trying to connect with her South Asian roots and introduces readers to a memorable cast of characters in a veritable feast of food, family traditions and fun. You can get your copy of Sari, Not Sari from Queen Books here.
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 and January 2022, Toronto Lit Up has produced 128 events that launched 152 books by 226 local authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
You are invited to the virtual launch of City of Sensors with author A.M. Todd on April 30 at 7 pm ET. Join Saba Mirza, the MC of the evening, at OBJX Studio in Toronto as A.M. Todd reads a selection from her new book and guests Kristine Sahagun and Calder Hutchinson read from their own short fiction.
Thoughtful and eerily prophetic, City of Sensors shines a light on a digital future rapidly becoming our reality. In a city where everything is recorded by data—from the coffee you drink to your most intimate secrets—Data Detective Frank Southwood, down on his luck and saddled with a gambling addiction, faces jail time if he can’t pay his debts. Working for an elite body of detectives who use big data for police work, Frank gets the case that might make his career when he begins investigating a high-profile money laundering ring. Meanwhile, he meets and falls for Jenny, a political activist with ties to the criminal underworld. Desperate to pay his debts, Frank makes a dirty bribery deal with Jenny’s fellow criminals, but soon his investigation leads him back to the criminals he himself works for. Forced to choose between putting Jenny in jail or else an innocent man in her place, Frank pushes the limits of morality in a world in which justice can seem preordained. You can get your copy of the book from Now Or Never Publishing here.
This event will take place in person at OBJX Studio, 100 Symes Road, Unit 200a in Toronto. Please RSVP through the registration button above.
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 and January 2022, Toronto Lit Up has produced 128 events that launched 152 books by 226 local authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
Join us for a special evening of poetry as McClelland & Stewart launches new collections from poets Madhur Anand, Laurie D. Graham, Tolu Oloruntoba and Phoebe Wang. Hear the authors read a selection from their new books, then stick around as they sit down with moderator Natasha Ramoutar for a live discussion and Q&A.
Anand’s new collection, Parasitic Oscillations, interrogates the poet’s own experience of working between the arts and the sciences on the one hand and living between North American and Indian cultures on the other, while Graham’s Fast Commute takes aim at the structures that support ecological injustice and attempts new forms of expression grounded in respect for flora, fauna, water, land and air. Oloruntoba’s Each One a Furnace explores (im)migration, diasporas, transience and instability by following the behaviour, and the abundant variety, of finches, and Wang’s Waking Occupations contemplates our obligations to live in a creative, generative and revolutionary way amid a cascade of global contingencies.
Get your copy of these new poetry collections from UofT Bookstore, the official bookseller for this event, here.
This event will take place virtually. Please return to this page on March 30 at 7pm ET to watch the event. A recording of the launch will be available to view for 72 hours.
Join Toronto Lit Up, Brick Books and A Different Booklist on Thursday, November 4, 2021 at 6:30pm ET to celebrate the launch of Assiyah Jamilla Touré’s book Autowar. The virtual event will feature Kim Ninkuru, Yemisi Adeleye, Ra’anaa Brown and host nènè myriam konaté.
Autowar is a visceral, vital, unblinking debut collection of poems exploring kinesthetic memory and longing, inherited violence, and the body as a geographical site. For some of us our first lessons are in how much pain we’re made to think we deserve–and the resulting scars are always meant to be kept secret. Assiyah Jamilla Touré’s debut collection is a record of those scars–not those inflicted on us by the thousands of little wars we live in everyday, but those that come afterwards, those we inflict upon ourselves to mark the path. You can get your copy of Autowar from A Different Booklist here.
About the special guests joining Assiyah Jamilla Touré:
NÈNÈ MYRIAM KONATÉ (b.1993, tio’tia:ke/mooniyang/montreal) is a child of ayiti and mali’s diasporas living between tio’tia:ke/mooniyang and ottawa, unceded kanien’keha:ka and algonquin anishinaabeg territories. their transdisciplinary practice is concerned with somatic knowledge(s) and storytelling. nènè is the founder of the clap back, a dialogue-based space that facilitates the emergence of transdisciplinary experiences by exploring relationships between pop culture and lived realities.
KIM NINKURU is a multimedia artist from Bujumbura, in Burundi, currently residing in Toronto. She uses performance art, installation, video, spoken word and movement to create pieces that give her the chance to explore and express rage, love, desire, beauty, or pain in relation to her own body and mind. Her work heavily questions our preconceived notions of gender, race, sexuality and class. It is grounded in the firm belief that blackness is past, present and future at any given moment.
YEMISI ADELEYE is an earrings enthusiast and a multidisciplinary artist based in Tiohtià:ke “Montreal”. Their main medium right now is DJing.
Originally from Brampton, Ontario, RA’ANAA BROWN received her BA and MA at Laurentian University’s McEwen School of Architecture. She is currently pursuing her PhD research on the intersection of Black art and activism (artivism) at Concordia University. Ra’anaa is the Co-Founder and President of Black Lives Matter Sudbury and Installation Coordinator for Up Here: Urban Arts Festival, where she has contributed her talents to the development of many Afrocentric artistic installations. As an artist, activist, and academic, Ra’anaa is dedicated to creating space for people of colour and continually promoting anti-racist practices and social justice.
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 to December 2020, Toronto Lit Up has produced 119 events to launch 143 books by 212 Toronto authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
Join Brick Books on Sunday, September 19, 2021 at 7pm ET to celebrate the launch of Charlie Petch’s debut poetry book, Why I Was Late. Hosted by Alessandra Naccarato, the event will feature special guests Rudy Ray and Polly Vernon. The free Toronto Lit Up book launch will be livestreamed from Theatre Passe Muraille.
Why I Was Late fuses text with performance, brings a transmasculine wisdom, humour, and experience to bear upon tailgates, spaceships, and wrestling rings. No subject—grief, disability, kink, sexuality, gender politics, violence—is off limits. You can purchase your copy of the book from Brick Books here.
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 to December 2020, Toronto Lit Up has produced 119 events to launch 143 books by 212 Toronto authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
Celebrate the launch of IMPACT: Women Writing After Concussion on Thursday, September 9 at 7pm ET with Toronto Lit Up and the University of Alberta Press! Six of the writers in IMPACT will read from their selections: Jane Cawthorne (co-editor with E. D. Morin), Tracy Wai de Boer, Judy Rebick, Julia Nunes, Dianah Smith and Amy Stuart. After the brief readings, the free event will be open for questions and discussion with moderator Jay Ingram. There will be captioning via the Zoom platform.
In IMPACT, 21 women writers consider the effects of concussion on their personal and professional lives. The anthology bears witness to the painstaking work that goes into redefining identity and regaining creative practice after a traumatic event. By sharing their complex and sometimes incomplete healing journeys, these women convey the magnitude of a disability which is often doubted, overlooked, and trivialized, in part because of its invisibility. Impact offers compassion and empathy to all readers and families healing from concussion and other types of trauma.
Books are available for sale from our partner bookstore, Another Story Bookshop. They offer in person sales, outdoor curbside pickup, local daily courier and shipment across Canada. Learn more here. If you are outside of Toronto, consider purchasing the book from your local indie bookstore.
Toronto Lit Up is a multi-year initiative, started in 2016 by the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Toronto Arts Council, to spotlight Toronto writers and empower local artists with career-building opportunities. Between April 2016 to December 2020, Toronto Lit Up has produced 119 events to launch 143 books by 212 Toronto authors. Toronto Lit Up book launches take place throughout the year at venues across the city. They are open to the public and free to attend. Click here for more information.
