11th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival (22-26 April, 2009)
10th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival (April 30- May 4, 2008)
11th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival (22-26 April, 2009)
Theme : Words that Matter
- Press Releases
- Schelule of events 2009
- 2009 Grand Prix
- 2009 Blue Metropolis Al Majidi Ibn Dhaher Arab Literary Prize
- Workshop 2009
- Pre-Festival event: Azar Nafisi in Montreal
Grand Prix 2009
Linda Leith Receives First Award of Excellence - Linguistic Duality
Closing Press Release
Click below to download the schedule of events in PDF
Festival 2009
A.S. Byatt: Recipient of the 2009 Blue Metropolis Literary Grand Prix
© Michael Trevillion
Born in Yorkshire in 1936, Antonia Susan Byatt is best known for her Booker Prize-winning novel Possession (1990), the story of two academic researchers whose lives mirror the romantically linked Victorian poets they are studying. A graduate of Newnham College (Cambridge) and Somerville College (Oxford), Byatt is an ambitious and intellectual writer of international reputation whose work regularly merges realism with fantasy. Inspired by genuine historical figures and traditions, Byatt often draws parallels and contrasts between lives and centuries in her work, weaving throughout her interests in history, biology and philosophy.
Byatt, whose work has been widely translated, is the author of more than two dozen works of fiction, including Angels & Insects (1992), The Matisse Stories (1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994), The Biographer's Tale (2000), and the quartet of novels The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002). She was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1999 and Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2003.
The Children's Book
The international launch of A.S. Byatt's new novel took place on April 22, 2009 - Opening Night of the 11th Blue Met Festival. The Children's Book (Knopf Canada) is a compulsively readable, panoramic story about the loss of childhood and family secrets, set in the looming shadow of World War I, against the backdrop of a bohemian Edwardian world. It tells the story of a famous writer, Olive Wellwood, who is writing a private book for each of her children. This vivid, rich and moving saga is played out against the great, rippling tides of the day, taking us from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme.
2009 Blue Metropolis Al Majidi Ibn Dhaher Arab Literary Prize: Zakaria Tamer
The 2009 Blue Metropolis Al Majidi Ibn Dhaher Arab Literary Prize was given to Syrian-born Zakaria Tamer in recognition of his extraordinary career as a writer.
© Monique Dysktra
Born in Damascus in 1931, Zakaria Tamer is one of the most widely-read short story writers, as well as a pre-eminent author of children's stories in Arabic. His short stories are often reminiscent of folktales, renowned for their relative simplicity on the one hand and the complexity of their many potential references on the other. Most of his stories deal with man's inhumanity to man, likewise to woman, the oppression of the poor by the rich and of the weak by the strong. Tamer has also published children's books and collections of his satirical newspaper columns. Breaking Knees, an English translation of one of his collections, was published in 2008. Zakaria Tamer currently lives in London.
Chaired by Blue Metropolis Founder and Artistic Director Linda Leith, the 2009 jury includes scholar and translator Dr. Issa J. Boullata; translator and owner of the Middle East Bookstore Hassan Isidean; head of the cultural section of Al Ahram Magda El Guindi; and Dr. Abdul Nabi Isstaif, professor of comparative literature and criticism at Damascus University.
Zakaria Tamer received the Blue Metropolis Al Majidi Ibn Dhaher Arab Literary Prize on April 23, 2009 during the 11th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival. The award ceremony was followed by an on-stage interview with Zakaria Tamer hosted by Issa Boulatta.
Fiction Master Class:
Donald Antrim: Fiction and Memoir: "Writing Ourselves"
Six-hour workshop including one lunch with workshop leader
This class explore, in workshop form, the challenging and often frustrating process of reading into one's own work. Class participants should submit in advance a short work sample-no more than 10 pages of either a story or the beginning of a novel. We work together to look into one another's manuscripts and to see aspects of the writer's work that may be underdeveloped, unnoticed, or even, avoided. This require a certain amount of trust on everyone's part-and in no way do questions of this sort need to ultimately dominate the conversation. At any rate, it is important for each student to have read the submitted work ahead of time. While there may be some in-class writing, this is not a first priority unless it becomes clear that an exercise might illustrate a point. Given the time constraints, however, it is likely be best to place the emphasis of the class on work-in-progress.
Fiction and memoir are not, as a rule, brought together in workshops. And yet many of the concerns that are most important to all of us-the technical production of form; the experience of psychological drive within the narrative; and the tangible-seeming, built-from-scratch, moral or immoral world our characters inhabit-are experienced by writers of fiction and memoir. Whatever we write, we may all have cause to wonder about the overt and the embedded evidence of our own experiences, even in works in which autobiographical material is scrupulously occluded. Perhaps, in opening the class to writers of non-fiction and fiction, there will be a fruitful exchange.
Donald Antrim is the author of three novels, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel, The Hundred Brothers and The Verificationist: A Novel. His latest publication is The Afterlife (2006). He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
N.B. This is a master class for professional Canadian writers; emerging writers will be admitted as space permits.
10th Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival (April 30- May 4, 2008)
Click below to download the schedule of events in PDF
Festival 2008
Children's Festival 2008
Daniel Pennac: Recipient of the 2008 Blue Metropolis Literary Grand Prix
© Monique Dykstra
French author Daniel Pennac receives 2008 Blue Metropolis Literary Grand Prix from Blue Metropolis Artistic Director Linda Leith in Montreal on April 30, 2008.
Born in Casablanca in 1944, Daniel Pennac is one of the most translated of contemporary French writers with books for both adults and children appearing in more than 30 languages around the world. His first few books (Au bonheur des ogres, La fée carabine, and La petite marchande de prose) were met with immediate success, and his 1984 novel L'œil du loup was translated into English as Eye of the Wolf by Sarah Adams, winning her the 2005 Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation. Pennac is also the author of The Malaussene Saga, a series of novels set in the popular, racially mixed Belleville quarter in the eastern part of Paris. He has also penned a book containing his reflections on reading entitled Comme un roman. In addition to becoming a best-seller in France, this work has been translated for English readers as both Reads like a Novel and Better than Life. Pennac’s most recent work includes the book Le dictateur et le hamac, a play entitled Merci, and a collection of essays that deal with school from the point of view of a student. This last work, Chagrin d'école, won the Prix Renaudot in 2007.