Yasmine enters Lebanon escaping a messy divorce and seeking the family, culture, and connection that her Palestinian mother hid during their life in Toronto. It’s 2006, and she’s meeting her cousin Reem for the first time after connecting over social media. Reem teaches Arabic and lives in a refugee camp with her mother and sister. […]
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A queer Palestinian refugee plans to come out at his elaborate birthday dinner party in this tragicomic modern reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Firas Dareer wakes up on his twenty-third birthday with a sense of purpose: today he’ll jump from a Stage 3 to a Stage 6 in his self-determined Coming Out Scale, professing his […]
*WINNER OF THE 2024 WRITERS’ TRUST ATWOOD GIBSON FICTION PRIZE* From Governor General’s Award-nominated author Sheung-King comes a novel about a millennial living through the Hong Kong protests, as he struggles to make sense of modern life and the parts of himself that just won’t gel. Glen Wu (aka Glue) couldn’t care less about his […]
A poignant, funny, and lively memoir of sexual awakening, music, and discovering one’s true self. Pete Crighton came of age in the early/mid 1980s in the shadow of HIV/AIDS. Growing up in Toronto, he was terrified that his friends and schoolmates would find out that he was “different” at a time when being gay felt […]
Toronto’s favourite festival returns at a new venue with a new format and five exciting days of celebrations for story lovers!
Pete Crighton is the best selling author of The Vinyl Diaries: Sex, Deep Cuts and My Soundtrack to Queer Joy and The B-52s’ Cosmic Thing in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series. Crighton is based in Wellington and Toronto and his work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Queerty, The Advocate, and the West […]
André Aciman is the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me By Your Name and Find Me, and various works of fiction and non fiction. He’s the editor of The Proust Project and teaches Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center. He lives with his wife in Manhattan.
Join us in conversation with Pete Crighton, whose work explores memory, desire, and identity. Crighton’s The Vinyl Diaries: Sex, Deep Cuts, and My Soundtrack to Queer Joy blends memoir and music, celebrating queer life with humor, honesty, and rhythm. He’ll be reading, reflecting, and discussing the power of art – literature, memory, and music – to […]
The award-winning author of Fifteen Dogs conjures up worlds – real, invented, uncanny – in this ingenious, electrifying collection. A Trinidadian Obeah man finds himself reborn, a hundred years after his death, in the body of a Canadian child. A writer takes up a seasonal job as the caretaker of a set of mysterious large […]
An inventive memoir about one family’s escape from Vietnam and the father’s mysterious disappearance along the way. This book is an intricate exploration of a searching mind, shedding light on the psyche of a grieving son, as he chases certainty and seeks elusive resolution. With the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the U.S. […]
Vinh Nguyen is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in Brick, Literary Hub, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, Grain, Queen’s Quarterly, The Criterion Collection’s Current, and MUBI’s Notebook. He is a nonfiction editor at The New Quarterly, where he curates an ongoing series on refugee, migrant, and diasporic writing. He is the author […]
David M. Shribman, executive editor of the Post-Gazette from 2003 to 2019, writes a nationally syndicated column in the United States; prepares a separate column on Americans affairs for the Globe and Mail, the national newspaper of Canada; has taught American politics at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at Montreal’s McGill University for […]
Harriet Alida Lye is the award-winning author of The Honey Farm, Natural Killer, Let It Destroy You, and the forthcoming novel Mother Daughter Lover Clown. She is also the co-author of a children’s picture book called Serge the Snail Without a Shell. Her essays and reporting have been published in The Globe & Mail, The […]
Matthew R. Morris is an educator, anti-racism advocate, and writer based out of Toronto. He earned a BA (Hons) and an MA in Social Justice Education from the University of Toronto. In addition to teaching, his work and public speaking on the deconstruction of Black masculinity, hip-hop culture, and schooling has taken him across North […]
Startlingly honest, bracing personal essays from a perceptive educator that bring us into the world of Black masculinity, hip-hop culture, and learning. This is an examination of the parts that construct my Black character; from how public schooling shapes our ideas about ourselves to how hip-hop and sports are simultaneously the conduit for both Black […]
Kelley Armstrong graduated with a degree in psychology and then studied computer programming. Now she is a full-time writer and parent, and she lives with her husband and three children in rural Ontario, Canada. She is the author of the Rockton mystery series featuring Detective Casey Duncan, which begins with City of the Lost, and […]
Susan Swan is a Toronto novelist and non-fiction writer and a professor emerita at York University. Her books include The Wives of Bath, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, What Casanova Told Me, The Western Light and Stupid Boys Are Good to Relax With. She is also co-founder of the Carol Shields Prize for […]
Victoria Hetherington is the author of two novels: Mooncalves (Now or Never Books, 2019), which was shortlisted for the 2020 Amazon First Novel Award, and Autonomy (Dundurn and Rare Machines, 2022). She is also the author of Into The Mist, a non-fiction historical account that explores a decades-long mystery in rural Saskatchewan. Hetherington lives in […]
Christine Estima is an Arab woman of mixed ethnicity (Lebanese, Syrian, and Portuguese) and the author of the short story collection The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society, which the CBC called one of the Best Fiction Books of 2023. She has written for The New York Times, The Walrus, VICE, The Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Maisonneuve, […]
Joy Fielding is the New York Times bestselling author of Someone Is Watching, Now You See Her, Still Life, Mad River Road, See Jane Run and other acclaimed novels. She divides her time between Toronto and Palm Beach, Florida.
Adam Bunch is an award-winning storyteller who brings the history of Toronto and Canada to life. He’s the author of The Toronto Book of the Dead and The Toronto Book of Love, the host of the Canadiana documentary series, and the creator of the Toronto Dreams Project. He’s taught history at George Brown College and […]
From the bestselling, award-winning author of Funny Boy and The Hungry Ghosts comes a breathtaking reimagining of ancient India through the extraordinary life of Yasodhara, the woman who married the Buddha. In this sweeping tale, at once epic and intimate, Shyam Selvadurai introduces us to Siddhartha Gautama—who will later become “the enlightened one,” or the Buddha—an unusually bright and […]
Saeed Teebi is an award-winning writer and lawyer. His debut short story collection, Her First Palestinian, was a finalist for several awards, including the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Prize. His nonfiction has appeared in The Globe and Mail and The New Quarterly. Born in Kuwait, he resettled in the United States, then Canada. He now […]
