Hope in Strange Paradises: Dystopias and their Bright Spots

Omar El Akkad, Margaret Atwood and Nahlah Ayed

Hope in Strange Paradises: Dystopias and their Bright Spots

Omar El Akkad, Margaret Atwood and Nahlah Ayed

7:00pm

Wednesday, September 22, 2021

The Toronto International Festival of Authors is delighted to co-present PEN Canada’s inaugural Graeme Gibson Talk, titled Hope in Strange Paradises: Dystopias and their Bright Spots. Award-winning authors Omar El Akkad and Margaret Atwood will be in conversation with CBC Radio IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed to discuss dystopias and storytelling. The event honours the legacy and creative spirit of renowned author and writers’ advocate Graeme Gibson (1934–2019) and is the first in an annual series.

Omar El Akkad and Margaret Atwood are no strangers to considering dystopian worlds, in their stories and in life. Moderated by CBC Radio IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed, the authors will explore current themes in dystopian literature, as well as bright spots—the freedoms and limitations of our era and their implications—all through the lens of their fiction. Following his successful debut, American War in 2019, El Akkad’s latest novel, What Strange Paradise, offers a profoundly moving look at the global refugee crisis. Atwood is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, critical essays and graphic novels. Her collected essays of the last 17 years, Burning Questions, will be published in 2022. This free hour-long conversation will be available for 72 hours on September 22 at 7pm ET.

The inaugural PEN Graeme Gibson Talk is generously supported by Penguin Random House Canada.


About PEN Canada
PEN Canada is a nonpartisan organization of writers that celebrates literature, defends freedom of expression, and aids persecuted writers. To learn more, and to donate to PEN Canada, please visit Pencanada.ca.

About CBC Radio’s IDEAS
Hosted by veteran journalist Nahlah Ayed, CBC Radio’s IDEAS is a deep-dive into contemporary thought and intellectual history. Anchored in a powerful legacy and expansive archive spanning over five decades, its topics are boundless. IDEAS features documentaries, illustrated interviews, and panel discussions which have earned it a raft of international and national awards and distinctions. It’s also home to Canada’s preeminent public lecture series, the CBC Massey Lectures, which showcase a Canadian thinker “to communicate the results of original study on important subjects of contemporary interest.”

PEN Canada Logo        TIFA Logo       CBC Ideas logo with radio for the mind tagline        Penguin Random House Canada logo

Conversation
Reading

The Toronto International Festival of Authors is delighted to co-present PEN Canada’s inaugural Graeme Gibson Talk, titled Hope in Strange Paradises: Dystopias and their Bright Spots. Award-winning authors Omar El Akkad and Margaret Atwood will be in conversation with CBC Radio IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed to discuss dystopias and storytelling. The event honours the legacy and creative spirit of renowned author and writers’ advocate Graeme Gibson (1934–2019) and is the first in an annual series.

Omar El Akkad and Margaret Atwood are no strangers to considering dystopian worlds, in their stories and in life. Moderated by CBC Radio IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed, the authors will explore current themes in dystopian literature, as well as bright spots—the freedoms and limitations of our era and their implications—all through the lens of their fiction. Following his successful debut, American War in 2019, El Akkad’s latest novel, What Strange Paradise, offers a profoundly moving look at the global refugee crisis. Atwood is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, critical essays and graphic novels. Her collected essays of the last 17 years, Burning Questions, will be published in 2022. This free hour-long conversation will be available for 72 hours on September 22 at 7pm ET.

The inaugural PEN Graeme Gibson Talk is generously supported by Penguin Random House Canada.


About PEN Canada
PEN Canada is a nonpartisan organization of writers that celebrates literature, defends freedom of expression, and aids persecuted writers. To learn more, and to donate to PEN Canada, please visit Pencanada.ca.

About CBC Radio’s IDEAS
Hosted by veteran journalist Nahlah Ayed, CBC Radio’s IDEAS is a deep-dive into contemporary thought and intellectual history. Anchored in a powerful legacy and expansive archive spanning over five decades, its topics are boundless. IDEAS features documentaries, illustrated interviews, and panel discussions which have earned it a raft of international and national awards and distinctions. It’s also home to Canada’s preeminent public lecture series, the CBC Massey Lectures, which showcase a Canadian thinker “to communicate the results of original study on important subjects of contemporary interest.”

PEN Canada Logo        TIFA Logo       CBC Ideas logo with radio for the mind tagline        Penguin Random House Canada logo

Conversation
Reading

Featured Authors

Omar El Akkad is an author and a journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay and many other locations around the world. His work earned Canada's National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.

Read more about Omar El Akkad

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize; The Year of the Flood, MaddAddam; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019, she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature.

Read more about Margaret Atwood

Nahlah Ayed, the host of CBC Radio’s Ideas, is an award-winning veteran foreign news reporter who spent nearly a decade in the Middle East covering the region's many conflicts, and later in London where she covered major stories from Russia's annexation of Crimea, Europe's refugee crisis; and the Brexit vote and its fallout. In 2012, her memoir, A Thousand Farewells: A Reporter's Journey From Refugee Camp to the Arab Spring, was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award. Nahlah was born and raised (mostly) in Winnipeg, Canada.

Read more about Nahlah Ayed

7:00pm

Wednesday, September 22

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