Wordfest presents Calgary’s Canada Reads Celebration

Wordfest presents Calgary's Canada Reads Celebration

Starring Emma Hooper, Jamie Chai Yun Liew, Saïd M’Dahoma & Michelle Morgan

Calgary's Canada Reads Celebration just got bigger! We're thrilled to be adding Emma Hooper (Etta and Otto and Russell and James) and her champion, Heartland star Michelle Morgan, to our exclusive event with Jamie Chai Yun Liew (Dandelion) and her champion, the Pastry Nerd Saïd M’Dahoma. The enhanced festivities start at 7 PM MT and include an audience Q & A and book signing, fuelled by Owl's Nest Books, who will be selling must-have copies of both books, along with the three other Canada Reads shortlisted titles. Pre-order here.

We are grateful to Arsenal Pulp Press and CBC Books for making this special event possible.

About Emma Hooper 

Emma Hooper is the author of internationally best-selling and award-winning novels Etta and Otto and Russell and James, Our Homesick Songs, and We Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky. Holding a PhD in music-literary studies, she has also published research in the fields of intermediality, gender studies, popular music and retro-futurism. As a musician she has worked with many clients and collaborators including Peter Gabriel, Newton Faulkner, the Heavy, and her own projects Red Carousel and Waitress for the Bees, which once earned her a Finnish Cultural Knighthood. Although she lives in the United Kingdom, Hooper comes home to Canada as often as she can and recently broke her toe in an over-zealous cross-country skiing incident. 

Website: emmahooper.ca
Instagram: @waitressforthebees

About Etta and Otto and Russell and James

“Etta and Otto and Russell and James is incredibly moving, beautifully written and luminous with wisdom. It is a book that restores one's faith in life even as it deepens its mystery. Wonderful!” –Chris Cleave, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Little Bee

“I've gone. I've never seen the water, so I've gone there. I will try to remember to come back.”

Etta's greatest unfulfilled wish, living in the rolling farmland of Saskatchewan, is to see the sea. And so, at the age of eighty-two she gets up very early one morning, takes a rifle, some chocolate, and her best boots, and begins walking the 2,000 miles to water.

Meanwhile her husband Otto waits patiently at home, left only with his memories. Their neighbour Russell remembers too, but differently—and he still loves Etta as much as he did more than fifty years ago, before she married Otto. 

Etta and Otto and Russell and James is a love story that spans 50 years, three lives, two continents and an ocean. It is a story of love and joy, pain and passion, memory and forgetting—and one incredible journey.

About Michelle Morgan

Michelle Morgan is a Canadian actor and filmmaker of Chilean descent, best known for her role as "Lou" on the beloved CBC drama Heartland. With more than 20 years of experience in film and television, her credits include Virgin River, Batwoman, and The Good Doctor. In addition to acting, Morgan has directed primetime television, along with award-winning short films and digital series. A passionate advocate for women’s rights, she has spent two decades supporting women’s shelters across Canada, partnering with organizations like The Brenda Strafford Women’s Shelter and Homefront Calgary. Morgan lives in Vancouver, with her husband, three children, and their black cat, Danny.

Instagram: @michellemorgan

About Jamie Chai Yun Liew

Jamie Chai Yun Liew is the recipient of the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop. She is a lawyer and law professor specializing in immigration, refugee, and citizenship law and the creator of the award-winning podcast Migration Conversations. Her non-fiction book, Ghost Citizens: Decolonial Apparitions of Stateless, Foreign and Wayward Figures in Law explores how the colonial and legal condition of statelessness is created and maintained. Dandelion is her first novel. She lives in Ottawa, Algonquin Anishinaabe territory, with her family.

Check out her website 

About Dandelion

An Asian woman traces her mother's past journey in order to learn who she really is and where she belongs.

When Lily was eleven years old, her mother, Swee Hua, walked away from the family, never to be seen or heard from again. Now a new mother herself, Lily becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Swee Hua. She recalls the spring of 1987, growing up in a small British Columbia mining town where there were only a handful of Asian families; Lily's previously stateless father wanted to blend seamlessly into Canadian life, while her mother, alienated and isolated, longed to return to Brunei. Years later, still affected by Swee Hua's disappearance, Lily's family is stubbornly silent to her questioning. But eventually, an old family friend provides a clue that sends Lily to Southeast Asia to find out the truth.

Winner of the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop, Dandelion is a beautifully written and affecting novel about motherhood, family secrets, migration, isolation, and mental illness. With clarity and care, it delves into the many ways we define home, identity, and above all, belonging.

About Saïd M'Dahoma

Saïd M’Dahoma is a French-Comorian-Canadian pastry chef living in Calgary. Born and raised in Paris where he earned his PhD in neuroscience, M’Dahoma moved to Alberta to work at the University of Calgary. Fueled by nostalgia, in his free time he started recreating French and Comorian dishes. Over time his passion for food overcame the one for science which led him to switch careers and become a full-time pastry chef. M’Dahoma now teaches French pastry on TV and to an online community of more than 200,000 students across the world. He is one of the Top 20 Compelling Calgarians of 2025.

Website: The Pastry Nerd
Instagram: @thepastrynerd

Curiouser?

• How a move to England helped Emma Hooper write about Saskatchewan. –The Globe and Mail
• Emma Hooper and Michelle Morgan Bond Over Caring for People with Dementia. –CBC Books
• Michelle Morgan Loves Books Set in the Past. –CBC Books
• Moving Portrait of Motherhood and Migration. –CBC Books
• "We Must Not Allow Stateless People to Be Made Outsiders." –The Globe and Mail
• Law Professor's Family Migration to Canada Informs Her Legal Career. –Canadian Lawyer
• Saïd M’Dahoma: My Life in Books. –Canada Reads
• Foodies of the Year 2021: Saïd M’Dahoma. –Western Living
• Saïd the Pastry Nerd. –YouTube