Wordfest presents Guy Gavriel Kay & J. M. Miro

Wordfest presents Guy Gavriel Kay & J. M. Miro

This 30th Anniversary pairing of Guy Gavriel Kay and J. M. Miro (the fantasy nom de plum of Steven Price) promises to be as exquisite as the fine whiskey you’ll be tasting at this spirited conversation, ringlead by Wordfest’s Shelley Youngblut. Miro describes Kay’s newest bestseller, Written in the Dark, as a masterpiece: “An absolutely astonishing novel about poetry, and war, and what it means to be human, by our greatest living writer of the fantastic.”

Not sure what to expect? Think "Hebridean Baker experience," but with a fantastical twist. Your ticket includes a premium tipple, audience Q & A, and book signing fuelled by Owl’s Nest Books. You can pre-order both featured books—Written in the Dark and Ordinary Monsters—and the authors’ back lists here.

We are grateful to Penguin Random House Canada for making it possible to connect you with Guy Gavriel Kay and J.M. Miro.

About Written on the Dark

From the internationally bestselling author of Tigana, All the Seas of the World, and A Brightness Long Ago comes a majestic new novel of love and war that brilliantly evokes the drama and turbulence of medieval France.

Thierry Villar is a well-known—even notorious—tavern poet, intimately familiar with the rogues and shadows of that world, but not at all with courts and power. He is an unlikely person, despite his quickness, to be swept into the deadly contests of ambitious royals, assassins, and invading armies.

But he is indeed drawn into all these things on a savagely cold night in his beloved city of Orane. And so Thierry must use all the intelligence and charm he can muster as power struggles merge with a decades-long war to bring his country to the brink of destruction.

As he does, he meets his poetic equal in an aristocratic woman and is drawn to more than one unsettling person with a connection to the world beyond this one. He also crosses paths with an extraordinary young woman driven by voices within to try to heal the ailing king — and help his forces in war. A wide and varied set of people from all walks of life take their places in the rich tapestry of this story.

Both sweeping and intimate, Written on the Dark is an elegant tour de force about power and ambition playing out amid the equally intense human need for art and beauty, and memories to be left behind.

About Guy Gavriel Kay

Guy Gavriel Kay is the international bestselling author of 15 previous novels, including the Fionavar Tapestry series, Tigana, The Last Light of the Sun, Under Heaven, River of Stars, Children of Earth and Sky, and A Brightness Long Ago. He has been awarded the International Goliardos Prize for his work in the literature of the fantastic and won the World Fantasy Award for Ysabel in 2008. In 2014 he was named to the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honor. His works have been translated into more than thirty languages.

Instagram/Threads: @guygavrielkay
Bluesky: @guygavrielkay.bsky.social
Website:  brightweavings.com 

About Ordinary Monsters, Book 1 of The Talents Trilogy

"Charles Dickens meets Joss Whedon in Miro’s otherworldly Netflix-binge-like novel." —Washington Post

Charlie Ovid, despite surviving a brutal childhood in Mississippi, doesn't have a scar on him. His body heals itself, whether he wants it to or not. Marlowe, a foundling from a railway freight car, shines with a strange bluish light. He can melt or mend flesh. When Alice Quicke, a jaded detective with her own troubled past, is recruited to escort them to safety, all three begin a journey into the nature of difference and belonging, and the shadowy edges of the monstrous.

What follows is a story of wonder and betrayal, from the gaslit streets of London, and the wooden theaters of Meiji-era Tokyo, to an eerie estate outside Edinburgh where other children with gifts—like Komako, a witch-child and twister of dust, and Ribs, a girl who cloaks herself in invisibility—are forced to combat the forces that threaten their safety. There, the world of the dead and the world of the living threaten to collide. With this new found family, Komako, Marlowe, Charlie, Ribs, and the rest of the Talents discover the truth about their abilities. And as secrets within the Institute unfurl, a new question arises: What truly defines a monster?

Riveting in its scope, exquisitely written, Ordinary Monsters presents a catastrophic vision of the Victorian world—and of the gifted, broken children who must save it.

About Bringer of Dust, Book 2 of The Talents Trilogy

The world of the dead is closer than you think.

Agrigento, Sicily, 1883. With the orsine destroyed, Cairndale lies in ruins, and Marlowe has vanished. His only hope of rescue lies in a fabled second orsine—long-hidden, thought lost—which might not even exist.

But when a body is discovered in the shadow of Cairndale, a body wreathed in the corrupted dust of the drughr, Charlie and the Talents realize there is even more at stake than they'd feared. For a new drughr has arisen, ferocious, horned, seemingly able to move in their world at will—and it is not alone. A malevolent figure, known only as the Abbess, desires the dust for her own ends. And deep in the world of the dead, a terrible evil stirs—an evil which the corrupted dust just might hold the secret to reviving, or destroying forever.

So the dark journey begun in Ordinary Monsters surges forward, from the sinister underworld of the London exiles, to the roar of the street markets in nineteenth-century Alexandria, to the sunlit silences of the Dalmatian coast. Against bone witches, mud glyphics, and a house of twilight that exists in a netherworld all its own, the Talents must work together—if they are to have any hope of staving off the world of the dead, and saving their long-lost friend.

About J. M. Miro

J. M. Miro is the author of the international bestseller Ordinary Monsters. He lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest and also writes under the name Steven Price.

About Host Shelley Youngblut

Shelley Youngblut is the CEO & Creative Ringleader of Wordfest. She was the recipient of the 2020 Calgary Award for Community Achievement in the Arts and the 2018 Rozsa Award for Arts Leadership. She also won the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Western Magazine Awards. Youngblut was the founding editor of Calgary’s award-winning Swerve magazine and has created magazines for ESPN, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Nickelodeon, Western Living, and The Globe and Mail. She was also a former pop-culture correspondent for ABC World News Now and Canada AM.

Facebook @ShelleyYoungblut 
Instagram/Threads: @youngblutshelley
Bluesky: @youngblut.bsky.social 

Be Curiouser

• Guy Gavriel Kay Talks About His Book Shelf. –ImagineOnAir 2021 Video
• Guy Gavriel Kay On Writing in Your Sleep. –Wordfest 25@25 Video
• Sheer Joy Comes Through in Ordinary Monsters. –Toronto Star
• On Listening to One Another: Esi Edugyan & Steven Price. –Wordfest 25@25 Video
• In Conversation with J. M. Miro –Avocado Diaries.