The Re-Read: The Sacrifice by Adele Wiseman

Anne Michaels and Hal Wake

The Re-Read: The Sacrifice by Adele Wiseman

Anne Michaels and Hal Wake

2:30pm

Friday, October 23

60 mins

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 Sacrifice by Adele Wiseman, published in 1956 and considered to be one of Canada’s first novels to focus on the immigrant experience. The Sacrifice is a haunting depiction of one family and its often tragic attempts to come to terms with a new life in a new country. It is a moving, almost biblical story of a father possessed by his hope for his only son; of a son who rebels against his father’s ideals, yet sacrifices himself to preserve what his father most prizes; and of a grandson who must reconcile the flaws in his inheritance.

Presenter: Anne Michaels
Moderator: Hal Wake

English captioning is available for this video. Please click the ‘CC’ button in the video toolbar to turn it on.

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 Sacrifice by Adele Wiseman, published in 1956 and considered to be one of Canada’s first novels to focus on the immigrant experience. The Sacrifice is a haunting depiction of one family and its often tragic attempts to come to terms with a new life in a new country. It is a moving, almost biblical story of a father possessed by his hope for his only son; of a son who rebels against his father’s ideals, yet sacrifices himself to preserve what his father most prizes; and of a grandson who must reconcile the flaws in his inheritance.

Presenter: Anne Michaels
Moderator: Hal Wake

English captioning is available for this video. Please click the ‘CC’ button in the video toolbar to turn it on.

Featured Authors

Anne Michaels
Anne Michaels is a novelist and poet. Her books are translated into more than fifty languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the Lannan Award for Fiction. Among many other honours she is a Guggenheim Fellow, has received honorary degrees, and has served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Her novel Fugitive Pieces was adapted as a feature film. Her most recent books include All We Saw, Infinite Gradation and Railtracks (co-written with John Berger). In 2020, her novel Fugitive Pieces was chosen for the BBC’s 100 Novels that Shaped the World.

Read more about Anne Michaels

Hal Wake
Hal Wake has been engaged with the literary community in Canada for almost 40 years. In the mid-1980s he was the book producer for CBC Radio's Morningside with Peter Gzowski. He has hosted or moderated hundreds of literary events at Festivals in Vancouver, Victoria, New York, Melbourne and Sydney Australia. He has interviewed Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie among many others. He is an honorary member of the Writers Union of Canada, on the board of the Writers' Trust of Canada and was Artistic Director of the Vancouver Writers Festival for 12 years.

Read more about Hal Wake

2:30pm

Friday, October 23

60 mins

What to read

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