Kanata Classics is a ground-breaking collection of timeless books, curated to lead the conversation on our country’s culture, history, and identity. Wordfest is thrilled to bring together four of the writers who’ve contributed to this amazing initiative: Jordan Abel and David Chariandy (NISHGA) and Kim Thúy and Sharon Bala (Ru). The conversation, hosted by Shelley Youngblut, includes an audience Q&A and book signing. You can pre-order all the books in the Kanata Classics Edition here from Owl’s Nest Books or purchase them at the show.
We are grateful to Penguin Random House Canada for making it possible to connect you with these writers.
From McClelland & Stewart, one of Turtle Island’s oldest and most venerable literary imprints, comes Kanata Classics, a ground-breaking collection that champions brilliant, timeless books, all masterfully selected to bring a balance of Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices into provocative and nuanced dialogue with one another. Explore the rich and diverse range of literary voices in our country and be a part of a new conversation on the multifaceted nature of Canada’s culture, history, and identity.
With a new introduction by David Chariandy, NISHGA is a groundbreaking, deeply personal, and devastating autobiographical meditation that attempts to address the complicated legacies of Canada’s residential school system and contemporary Indigenous existence.
As a Nisga’a writer, Jordan Abel often finds himself in a position where he is asked to explain his relationship to Nisga’a language, Nisga’a community, and Nisga’a cultural knowledge. However, as an intergenerational survivor of residential school—both of his grandparents attended the same residential school–his relationship to his own Indigenous identity is complicated to say the least.
NISHGA explores those complications and is invested in understanding how the colonial violence originating at the Coqualeetza Indian Residential School impacted his grandparents’ generation, then his father’s generation, and ultimately his own. The project is rooted in a desire to illuminate the realities of intergenerational survivors of residential school, but sheds light on Indigenous experiences that may not seem to be immediately (or inherently) Indigenous. Drawing on autobiography and a series of interconnected documents (including pieces of memoir, transcriptions of talks, and photography), NISHGA is a book about confronting difficult truths and it is about how both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples engage with a history of colonial violence that is quite often rendered invisible.
Jordan Abel is a queer Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize). NISHGA was the winner of the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres award and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction, and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. Abel’s work has been published in numerous journals and magazines—including Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, and The Fiddlehead—and his work has been anthologized widely, including The Broadview Introduction to Literature. Abel completed a Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University in 2019 and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta where he teaches Indigenous Literatures, Research-Creation, and Creative Writing.
David Chariandy lives in Vancouver and teaches literature and creative writing in the department of English at Simon Fraser University. His first novel, Soucouyant, was nominated for several prizes, including the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Giller Prize. His second novel, Brother, was also nominated for several prizes, winning the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Toronto Book Prize. Brother was also named a book of the year by The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Toronto Star, The Montreal Gazette, The New York City Public Library, Kirkus Reviews, Esquire Magazine, and The Guardian. His most recent book is a memoir entitled I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You: A Letter To My Daughter. Chariandy’s writings have been published internationally and translated into a dozen languages. In 2019, he was awarded Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction.
With a new introduction by Sharon Bala, Ru is a lullaby for Vietnam and a love letter to a new homeland.
Ru. In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow—of tears, blood, money. Kim Thúy’s Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. There, the young girl feels the embrace of a new community, and revels in the chance to be part of the American Dream. As an adult, the waters become rough again: now a mother of two sons, she must learn to shape her love around the younger boy’s autism.
Moving seamlessly from past to present, from history to memory and back again, Ru is a book that celebrates life in all its wonder: its moments of beauty and sensuality, brutality and sorrow, comfort and comedy.
Born in Saigon in 1968, Kim Thúy left Vietnam with the boat people at the age of 10 and settled with her family in Quebec. A graduate in translation and law, she has worked as a seamstress, interpreter, lawyer, restaurant owner, media personality and television host. She lives in Montreal and devotes herself to writing. Thúy has received many awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2010, and was one of the top 4 finalists of the Alternative Nobel Prize in 2018. Her books have sold more than 850,000 copies around the world and have been translated into 29 languages and distributed across 40 countries and territories. In 2023, Thúy was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada for her significant contributions to literature, particularly for “amplifying the voices and experiences of migrants and refugees.”
Sharon Bala’s bestselling debut novel, The Boat People, won the 2020 Newfoundland & Labrador Book Award and the 2019 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. It was a finalist for Canada Reads 2018, the 2018 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. The Boat People is on sale worldwide with translations in French, German, Arabic, and Turkish. Bala received the 2017 CBC Emerging Artist Award In 2017. That same year she won the Writers’ Trust/ McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize for her short story Butter Tea at Starbucks. Her short fiction has also won three Newfoundland and Labrador Arts & Letters Awards and been published in: The Journey Prize 29, Hazlitt, Grain, PRISM international, The Dalhousie Review, The New Quarterly, Maisonneuve, The Newfoundland Quarterly Online, Room, and Riddle Fence. Visit her online at: sharonbala.com.
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. A former pop-culture correspondent for ABC World News Now and Canada AM, she was also a frequent contributor to CBC Calgary’s The Eyeopener, The Homestretch, and Daybreak Alberta.
Facebook: @ShelleyYoungblut
Instagram/Threads: @youngblutshelley
Bluesky: @youngblut
Shelley Youngblut
Talk Show Format
Audience Q&A
Pop-Up Bookstore
Post-Show Signing
Libations Bar
75 minutes. No intermission
Penguin Random House Canada
Shelley Youngblut
Talk Show Format
Audience Q&A
Pop-Up Bookstore
Post-Show Signing
Libations Bar
75 minutes. No intermission
Penguin Random House Canada
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