Alice Winn
Alice Winn is a novelist and screenwriter. She grew up in Paris and was educated in British boarding schools. Winn has a degree in English literature from Oxford University. Her first novel, In Memoriam, was the UK’s biggest selling hardback fiction debut of 2023, won Waterstones’ Novel of the Year Prize, and was named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and NPR. Winn lives in Brooklyn.
Website: alicewinn.com
Instagram: @alicewinnauthor
FESTIVAL SHOWS
An Evening with Alice Winn
Oct. 17 @ 7:30 PM $25
Memorial Park Library, 2nd Floor
Literary Death Match
Starring Shashi Bhat, JD Derbyshire, Roddy Doyle, Catherine Hernandez, Alice Kuipers, Heather O’Neill, Nita Prose & Alice Winn
Oct. 18 @ 7:30 PM $25
DJD Dance Centre
How to… Write About War
Hosted by Deborah Willis
Oct. 19 @ 10 AM FREE
Alexander Calhoun Salon, Memorial Park Library, Main Floor
FESTIVAL BOOK
In Memoriam
It’s 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.
Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle—an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood—without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt’s family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt’s horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.
An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.
GET THE BOOK
Owl’s Nest Books | Calgary Public Library | Audio
BE CURIOUSER
- Alice Winn Interview: “We live in the fossilised wreckage of World War One.” –The Guardian
- In Memoriam by Alice Winn review: a vivid rendering of love and frontline brutality in the first world war. –The Guardian
- A Debut Novel Creates a World From Pages Taken From the Past. –The New York Times
- A powerful, deeply imagined debut (starred review). –Kirkus Reviews
