Billie Livingston, award winning Canadian author and poet, is set to release her latest novel, One Good Hustle, which follows the life of Sammie Bell—a young woman who fears she may spend her life as a hustler, like her parents. Livingston has lived all around the world from Toronto and Vancouver to Japan, Germany, England […] More »

  Jen Neale is a 28-year-old Vancouver based writer and winner of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, for her story “Elk-Headed Man”. This particular literary prize boasts a fine track record of uncovering some of the country’s future literary stars. Past winner Alyssa York presented Neale with $5,000 in Toronto on Wednesday. […] More »

The ramshackle A-frame house Al Purdy built still stands by the lake in Ameliasburgh, Ontario. A place “so far from anywhere,” he wrote, “even homing pigeons lost their way.” Inside, it’s nearly as it was when he died 10 years ago. His drawers and cupboards still hold the flotsam and jetsam of a well lived […] More »

Progressive media, it seems, is one of the very few bright spots in today’s bleak world of journalism. Despite the cash-strapped economy, rather than succumbing to the heavy hand of advertisers or clinging to sensationalized coverage—as their corporate counterparts have been obliged to do—independent progressive media has managed to survive and flourish by simply sticking […] More »

Several of my previous blog posts have mentioned Kwani?, the Nairobi literary journal/publishing network dedicated to building contemporary African literature. My interest in the publication was first aroused by the contrasting literary scenes in Uganda and Kenya. While FEMRITE, based in Kampala, Uganda, is a strong local writers’ organization, I never found a literary magazine […] More »

When I attended the Caine Prize in London last week, I was excited to listen to the voices of some of Africa’s top authors. I felt caught up in the growing literature movement: writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Binyavanga Wainaina topping international headlines, developing a notable reputation within their countries and abroad. However, interviewing […] More »

Last Saturday afternoon, I attended “Writing Africa: Making 10 years of the Caine Prize“ at the British Library in London. The prize, which awards around $16,000 to the best short story written by an African author, featured previous winners Chika Unigwe, Binyavanga Wainana and Brian Chikwava. After the reading, a member of the audience asked whether this increasing […] More »

Steven W. Beattie writes today on the Maisonneuve blog about “The Troubling Case of Roman Polanski,” arguing that the condemnations that have burst forth in the last couple of days following Polanski’s arrest is “a failure of one of the artist’s most significant attributes: empathy.” Polanski’s crime – and all its attendant issues of patriarchy, […] More »

Ian Brown’s The Boy in the Moon had already achieved a mythic status long before it was ever ready for public eyes. It was this insiders’ rumour, the much anticipated, nagging project that was going to blow away everything the Globe and Mail feature writer had ever written previously.  As far back as 2007, the […] More »

I feel like I’ve been re-reading the same article all week. Politicians quoted in The Globe and Mail, National Post and others talk about this weekend’s Le Moulin à Paroles like it’s the last nail in Confederation’s coffin. “There was the death of a man. These were tragic events,” Intergovernmental Affairs Minister, Josée Verner told […] More »

Today marks the first day of school. Millions of children in Ontario and Canada are going back to class, back to their teachers and subjects, back to their school routine. This is the first fall, ever, that I haven’t gone back to skool. Reflecting on the whole experience I feel a big nostalgic, even a […] More »