52 Coast to Coast

Anita Rau Badami Quebec	Zsuzsi Gartner British Columbia	Wayne Johnston Newfoundland
Miriam Toews Ontario

Anita Rau Badami, Quebec

Anita Rau Badami’s first two novels, Tamarind Mem and The Hero’s Walk, were both international bestsellers. The Hero’s Walk won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada and Caribbean) and Italy’s Premio Berto, was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize. The recipient of the Marian Engel Award for a woman writer in mid-career, Badami currently resides in Montreal. Her new novel is Tell It to the Trees. Read more

Zsuzsi Gartner, British Columbia

Zsuzsi Gartner is the author of the critically acclaimed story collection All the Anxious Girls on Earth and the editor of Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow. A former senior editor at Saturday Night magazine, she is currently creative director of Vancouver Review’s Blueprint B.C. Fiction Series. She is the winner of a 2007 National Magazine Award for Fiction and the recipient of numerous awards for her magazine journalism. Read more

Wayne Johnston, Newfoundland

Wayne Johnston was born and raised in Goulds, Newfoundland. His celebrated novels include The Story of Bobby O'Malley, which won the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award; The Divine Ryans, which was adapted for film; The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Navigator of New York, which both spent extended periods of time on bestseller lists in Canada and have been published internationally. His latest, A World Elsewhere, revolves around a nineteenth-century mystery involving the suspected murder of a child. Read more

Miriam Toews, Ontario

Miriam Toews is the author of four previous novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck; A Boy of Good Breeding; the Governor General Award–winning, Canada Reads–winning, bestselling novel A Complicated Kindness; and The Flying Troutmans, which won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. She has also published one work of non-fiction: Swing Low: A Life. Her new novel, Irma Voth, depicts the upheaval that occurs in a Mennonite community when a film crew arrives. She lives in Toronto. Read more

Host: Andreas Schroeder
Saturday, October 22, 2011 - 10:30am
Performance Works
$17

Come take a journey through the vast and diverse literary landscape of Canada, discovering the depths of great Canadian writing from coast to coast. Starting off in the west, Vancouver’s own Zsuzsi Gartner brings us satirical snapshots of city life in Better Living through Plastic Explosives. Governor General’s Award-winning writer Miriam Toews follows Irma Voth’s path from the Canadian prairies to Mexico, as she unravels the secrets of her troubled Mennonite family and fights for a better life for herself and her sisters. Acclaimed Montreal writer Anita Rau Badami transports us to northern British Columbia to tell a chilling tale of murder and secrets revealed in Tell It to the Trees. Wayne Johnston, one of Newfoundland’s finest writers, finishes the journey on the east coast in A World Elsewhere, a tale of ambition, suspected murder and the struggle for redemption. These four very different writers come together to remind us of the power of place and its ability to inspire these rich Canadian stories.

This event is sponsored by The Vancouver Sun.

52 Coast to Coast

2011 Festival