Wordfest Presents Marina Endicott & Elizabeth Hay

Wordfest Presents Marina Endicott & Elizabeth Hay

Wordfest is thrilled to welcome back award-winning authors — and audience favourites —  Marina Endicott and Elizabeth Hay to the Memorial Park stage to discuss their new novels, The Observer and Snow Road Station. The 75-minute conversation starts at 7 PM MT and will be followed by an audience Q&A and a book signing, fuelled by Owl's Nest Books.

We are grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts and Penguin Random House Canada for making it possible for Wordfest to reconnect you with the wondrous Endicott and Hay.

About The Observer  

A spare and powerful new novel from the award-winning author of Good to a Fault and The Little Shadows.

When Julia arrives in Medway, accompanying her beloved Hardy on his first posting as an RCMP constable, she tries to explain her new life to old friends from the city, but can find no shared vocabulary to convey this rural reality, let alone police life. As Hardy disappears into long days at work, Julia takes a job as editor of the local newspaper, The Observer. Interviewing people to compose a view of the town each week, she gathers knowledge of the community’s surface joys and sorrows; meanwhile, Hardy is immersed in violence and loss, and Julia can only witness his increasing exhaustion. At first this new life together is an adventure, but as in all the best stories, time darkens and deepens it.

Grounded in Marina Endicott’s own experience in Mayerthorpe, Alberta, The Observer is an essential story from one of our most beloved storytellers. Endicott writes with the sure pacing and insight of a master novelist, piecing haunting details into a quietly devastating revelation of the fragility of life and law in a tightknit community.

About Marina Endicott

Marina Endicott’s much-celebrated novels include Good to a Fault, The Little Shadows, Close to Hugh and The Difference. She lives in Saskatoon.

About Snow Road Station

An exquisitely etched coming-of-middle-age story.” –Ann-Marie MacDonald

From the Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author comes a novel, witty and wise, about thwarted ambition, unrealized dreams, the enduring bonds of female friendship, and love’s capacity to surprise us at any age.

In the winter of 2008, as snow falls without interruption, an actor in a Beckett play blanks on her lines. Fleeing the theatre, she beats a retreat into her past and arrives at Snow Road Station, a barely discernible dot on the map of Ontario.

The actor is Lulu Blake, in her 60s now, a sexy, seemingly unfooled woman well-versed in taking risks. Out of work, humiliated, she enters the last act of her life wondering what she can make of her diminished self. In Snow Road Station, she decides she is through with drama, but drama, it turns out, isn’t through with her. She thinks she wants peace. It turns out she wants more.

Looming in the background is that autumn’s global financial meltdown, while in the foreground family and friends animate a round of weddings, sap harvests, love affairs, and personal turmoil. At the centre of it all is the lifelong friendship between Lulu and Nan. As the two women contemplate growing old, they surrender certain hard-held dreams and confront the limits of the choices they’ve made and the messy feelings that kept them apart for decades.

About Elizabeth Hay

Elizabeth Hay is the Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of six novels, including Late Nights on Air, His Whole Life, and A Student of Weather. Her memoir All Things Consoled won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction; and her story collection Small Change was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. A former radio broadcaster, she spent a number of years in Mexico and New York City and makes her home in Ottawa.

About Host Christina Frangou

Christina Frangou is a Calgary journalist who writes about health and social issues. Her stories have appeared in The Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Maclean's and The Guardian, among others, and cover topics like refugee health, domestic violence, loneliness and widowhood. Frangou has received a National Newspaper Award and two National Magazine Awards for feature writing. In 2022, she was awarded the Landsberg Award from the Canadian Women’s Foundation and Canadian Journalism Foundation for her work shedding light on gender injustice in Canada.

Follow her on Post News @cfrangou

Curiouser?

• A Sharp Sweetness: Elizabeth Hay revisits a fictional world. –Literary Review of Canada