Join author and playwright Suvendrini Lena and translator Dushy Gnanapragasam on Tuesday, January 24 at 7pm ET to celebrate the release of The Enchanted Loom (Playwrights Canada) at 1RG (1 Roof Garden Lane – northeast corner of Bloor and Dovercourt)! This free Toronto Lit Up event will feature a dramatized reading from the play by Bhavani Somasundaram, Sathiyakumar Jeyapal, Kavini Vijayasekaran and James Purdee Gnani. It will be hosted by Geetha Sukamaran with comments by Harini Sivalingam. Masks are welcome and recommended. Food and drinks will be served.
Access info: There are 3 steps to enter the mainspace; there is an alternative entrance via a garage with a portable ramp. Clearance for entering the event space is 27″. There is a mainfloor bathroom.
In The Enchanted Loom, the Sri Lankan civil war has left many scars on Thangan and his family, most noticeably the loss of his eldest son and the crippling epileptic seizures brought on by his torture. As the final days of the war play out, the family bears witness from their new home of Toronto. Thangan’s other son Kanan comes home from a protest, shaken that someone referred to him by his brother’s name. His young daughter Kavitha innocently dances around with a mysterious pair of anklets that she found. And Thangan’s wife Sevi is consumed with feeling responsible for her broken family. Amidst the ongoing trauma, the family is faced with the possibility of Thangan undergoing neurological surgery. Will the surgery give them a chance to heal, or will it cause even more pain?
Presented in both English and Tamil, this poetic play is both medical and mystical, drawing a connection between trauma and memory that creates a stark reminder of loss, hope, family, and freedom.
Suvendrini Lena is a playwright and neurologist. She works as the staff neurologist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and at the Centre for Headache at Women’s College Hospital. She is a lecturer in psychiatry and neurology at the University of Toronto where she teaches medical students, residents, and fellows. She also teaches a course called Staging Medicine, a collaboration between the Theatre Centre and University of Toronto Postgraduate Medical Education. As a neurologist she is particularly interested in conditions that alter the fabric of consciousness—epilepsy, dementia, psychosis, and migraine.
Dushy Gnanapragasam received his initiation into theatre at St. Henry’s College in Illavalai, Sri Lanka, and has been an integral part of the vibrant Tamil theatre scene in Toronto for over twenty years. He has directed several of his own translations for Manaveli Performing Arts Group, including Harold Pinter’s New World Order, Mario Fratti’s The Satraps, and Ivan Turgenev’s Broke. He has also directed plays for Asylum Theatre Group, including R. Cheran’s What if the Rain Fails and Not By Our Tears. Off stage, he writes and translates for Thaiveedu, a Tamil monthly with a heavy focus on the arts.
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.
Bronwyn Haslam is a Montreal-based translator. Her translations have appeared in Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader, Asymptote, Aufgabe and The Capilano Review, among others. She holds a master’s degree in literature from the Université de Montréal and undergraduate degrees from the University of Calgary. With Aleshia Jensen, she co-translated Mirion Malle’s This Is How I Disappear.
Tracy Hurren is a senior editor at Drawn & Quarterly and works with Adrian Tomine, Lynda Barry, Kate Beaton, and many more of the world’s best cartoonists. She’s worked for the Montreal house for over ten years. She has an MPub from Simon Fraser University.
Judith Weisz Woodsworth is a translator and former university professor. She has published widely on translation history and theory, including Translators through History, with Jean Delisle. Her recent publications include the monograph Telling the Story of Translation: Writers Who Translate (2017), the edited volumes The Fictions of Translation (2018) and Translation and the Global City: Bridges and Gateways (2021), and Hutchison Street (2018), a translation of Abla Farhoud’s novel Le sourire de la petite juive. She was founding president of the Canadian Association for Translation Studies and has served as a senior administrator at universities in Halifax, Sudbury and Montréal. Judith Weisz Woodsworth lives in Montréal, Quebec.
Pierre Anctil is an award-winning author, a member of the Royal Society of Canada since 2012 and a professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa, where he taught contemporary Canadian history and Canadian Jewish history. He has written at length on the history of Montreal’s Jewish community and on the current debates on cultural pluralism in Canada. His most recent English-language titles are History of the Jews in Quebec (2021), Jacob Isaac Segal: A Montreal Yiddish Poet and His Milieu (2017) and A Reluctant Welcome for Jewish People: Voices in Le Devoir’s Editorials, 1910–1947 (2019), all at the University of Ottawa Press.
Susan Ouriou is an award-winning fiction writer and literary translator from French and Spanish with over sixty translations and co-translations of fiction, non-fiction, children’s and young-adult literature to her credit. She has won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation and been short-listed for that same award on five other occasions. A number of her translations have also been placed on IBBY’s (International Board on Books for Youth) Honour List. She has also written two novels, Nathan and Damselfish, the latter of which was short-listed for two awards, as well as numerous short stories. Susan lives in Calgary, Alberta.
Leigh Nash is the publisher at House of Anansi Press. Previously she was the publisher at Invisible Publishing, taught book publishing at York University, worked at Coach House Books, was a founding partner of editorial firm Re:word Communications and co-founder of chapbook press The Emergency Response Unit. She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph and has published a poetry collection, Goodbye, Ukulele. (Photo credit: Johnny CY Lam)
Hear from the translators and editors of White Resin (House of Anansi) and This is How I Disappear (Drawn & Quarterly), two books nominated for the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award in Translation. Bronwyn Haslam, Tracy Hurren, Aleshia Jensen, Susan Ouriou and Leigh Nash will join interviewer Steven Beattie for an informative panel discussion on the challenges of bringing French-language Canadian fiction to English readers. Audrée Wilhelmy’s White Resin, translated by Susan Ouriou, is an ethereal love story and an homage to feminine nature as it both stands against and remains entwined with the industrial world. Mirion Malle’s This Is How I Disappear, translated by Haslam and Jensen, opens a window into the lives of young people as they face a barrage of mental health hurdles. Learn what goes into the translation process and the important behind-the-scenes work publishing houses do to support the endeavor.
Interviewer: Steven Beattie
Please return to this page on November 14 at 2pm ET to watch the event. The video will be available to view until November 21 at 11:59pm ET.
This free, virtual event is organized in collaboration with the Canada Council for the Arts to celebrate the finalists and winners of the Governor General’s Literary Awards (GGBooks). This year, TIFA is pleased to host finalists from the French-to-English Translation category. The winners will be announced on November 16.
What is left of someone who was not important enough to be archived? Canadian author Céline Huyghebaert’s Remnants, translated by Aleshia Jensen, is a finalist for the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation. This dreamlike memoir is an exploration of essential questions about the value of life in its duration and passing, told through a profound investigation of a father’s life and sudden death. Join both Huyghebaert and Jensen for an insightful conversation on how we talk about what no longer exists, and about the artistic process of translating complex concepts from French to English.
Interviewer: Heidi Reitmaier
Please return to this page on November 14 at 2pm ET to watch the event. The video will be available to view until November 21 at 11:59pm ET.
This free, virtual event is organized in collaboration with the Canada Council for the Arts to celebrate the finalists and winners of the Governor General’s Literary Awards (GGBooks). This year, TIFA is pleased to host finalists from the French-to-English Translation category. The winners will be announced on November 16.
Governor General’s Literary Award finalists Pierre Anctil and Judith Weisz Woodsworth, as well as Dominique Rankin and Marie-Josée Tardiff come together for a fascinating talk about their new books, both nominated in the Translation category. Written by Anctil and translated by Woodsworth, History of the Jews in Quebec explores four centuries of history, how the Jewish community has evolved over time in the region and the cultural context that encouraged the emergence of a unique Jewish community in Montreal in particular. They Called Us Savages, co-authored by Rankin and Tardiff and translated by Ben Vrignon, follows Rankin’s own powerful life story. Having been torn from his rightful place as the next Algonquin Hereditary Chief and Medicine Man and forced into the residential school system, Rankin interweaves his own journey of healing and self-discovery, into the book’s wider contemplation of changing relationships with the environment, leadership, racism, reconciliation and spirituality.
Interviewer: Roland Gulliver
Please return to this page on November 14 at 2pm ET to watch the event. The video will be available to view until November 21 at 11:59pm ET.
This free, virtual event is organized in collaboration with the Canada Council for the Arts to celebrate the finalists and winners of the Governor General’s Literary Awards (GGBooks). This year, TIFA is pleased to host finalists from the French-to-English Translation category. The winners will be announced on November 16.