Individuellement, they’ve won multiple Governor General’s Literary Awards en plusieurs genres. Fanny Britt (Sugaring Off) and Susan Ouriou—Sugaring Off’’s translator—sit down for a bilingual chat celebrating the just-released English translation of Britt’s award-winning novel, Faire les sucres, which Daughter author Claudia Dey lauds as “gorgeous, profound, and never without humour.” Complimentary Coffee & Tea provided by Barrow Coffee Roasters.

At turns edgy, humorous, experimental, complex, and raw, the tales told by these cross-country stars of contemporary Canadian storytelling—B.C.-based story story innovators Carleigh Baker (Last Woman) and Shashi Bhat (Death By A Thousand Cuts), Montreal écrivaine Fanny Britt (Sugaring Off), graphic novelist Sig Burwash (Vera Bushwack), Wordfest fave Richard Kelly Kemick (Hello, Horse), and Albertan force of nature Conor Kerr (Prairie Edge)—speak to our longing for community and connection. 

Wordfest’s Creative Ringleader Shelley Youngblut has not stopped thinking or raving about Alice Winn’s debut novel, In Memoriam, since she read it over the holiday break last year. The literary world was equally shaken to its core: the painstakingly researched book—which charts the unlikely love story of a pair of teens from their idyllic, privileged private college to the mud and gore of the Somme in the First World War—is historically accurate, a queer love story that echoes Brideshead Revisited, and (likely unintended) a visceral path to assimilating the horror of modern war in Ukraine. It won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and Novel of the Year in 2023, and was a Good Morning America book pick. So how did a dyslexic, then-30-year-old writer and screenwriter, born in Paris, educated at Marlborough College (the boarding school in her book) and Oxford, now living in Brooklyn, come to create a novel that transcends genre, stigma, and time?