| Diaspora Dialogues |
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| Culture | |
| Thursday, 03 July 2008 | |
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TORONTO STORIES (Tales of the City) Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London Thursday, 10 July, 7.45pm, £9
Rawi Hage is a one-of-a-kind publishing success story. Born in Beirut, Hage lived through nine years of Lebanese civil war, before immigrating to Canada in 1992. His debut De Niro's Game - a poetic evocation of the struggles of two young men in war-ravaged Beirut - was written between shifts as a taxi driver in Montreal. Gleaned from the publishing slush pile, the novel went on to dazzle critics and be nominated for a slew of prizes in Canada, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General's Literary Award and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. De Niro's Game won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award on June 12. His second novel, Cockroach will be published in Canada in fall 2008. "Hage's exhilarating debut novel
captures a dreamlike, cacophonous Beirut during the Lebanese civil war...
its impact lingers long after the last bomb has landed." - Observer
"Vincent Lam's masterly debut is a collection of stories tracing the experiences of four medical students.... all conveyed in incisive, clear prose as faultless as a carefully stitched suture." - Guardian Priscila Uppal is a 33-year-old Canadian poet and fiction writer based in Toronto. The daughter of a Brazilian mother and a South Asian father, Uppal published her first poetry collection, How to Draw Blood From a Stone (1998) at 23 and her first novel The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002) four years' later. Her second novel, To Whom It May Concern, will be released by Doubleday Canada in spring 2009. She has published five books of poetry and been nominated for the prestigious Griffin Prize for Poetry. "In its confident voice and its unsparing, concisely powerful narrative - like Margaret Lawrence at her best - Divine Economy is an impressive debut." - The Globe and Mail LAL comprises vocalist Rosina Kazi, electronic music composer and producer Nick Murray, bassist Ian DeSouza, and prolific percussionist Rakesh Tewari. The multi-cultural collective having been using their South Asian-flecked, electronic soul to explore social issues for ten years, opening for acts as diverse as Nelly Furtado, Warsawpack, Roy Ayers, and State of Bengal. Their latest album Deportation was released in Canada last month. LAL will tour Europe in autumn. Toronto Stories: Tales from the City is organised by Diaspora Dialogues, a Toronto-based organisation supporting the creation and presentation of new fiction, poetry and drama that reflect the complexity of the city back to Torontonians through the eyes of its richly diverse writers. To book tickets please go to: http://www.londonlitfest.com |
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Vincent Lam grew up in Ottawa
in a family from the expatriate Chinese community of Vietnam. A doctor
of medicine and freelance writer, Lam was serving as a doctor on an
Arctic cruise ship, when he met Margaret Atwood, who encouraged and
supported his Giller-prize-winning short story collection Bloodletting
and Miraculous Cures. Lam's first novel, Cholon, Near Forgotten, about
a Chinese compulsive gambler and headmaster of an English school in
Saigon during the Vietnam War, will be published by Fourth Estate.| < Prev | Next > |
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