Day Six

Wish you were here.

In Person Fiction Poetry

Admission

Free

Tuesday

May , 2020

5:00pm

Eastern

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Ayelet Gundar Goshen Billy-Ray Belcourt · Photo by Jaye Simpson David Bergen · Photo by Luke Bergen Mona Awad · Photo by Angela Sterling Shani Mootoo · Photo by Darren Rampersaud Souvankham Thammavongsa · Photo by Steph Martyniuk

As we practice physical distancing, let us stay close to each other in our thoughts, prayers and acts of kindness. The only thing more contagious than COVID-19 is a smile.

Today’s guest authors would have been:

Billy-Ray Belcourt

Souvankham Thammavongsa and David Bergen

Mona Awad, Shani Mootoo and Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Please consider supporting the amazing authors that were set to be with us this Spring. Spring author bios now include a link to their work via Perfect Books on Elgin Street.

The Authors

Ayelet Gundar Goshen

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is the winner of the JQ-Wingate Prize for Waking Lions. She is a clinical psychologist, has worked for the Israeli civil rights movement, and is an award-winning screenwriter. She won Israel’s prestigious Sapir Prize for best debut. Waking Lions, her first novel published in the United States, has been published in seventeen countries and was a New York Times Notable Book. Shop locally if you can: Books by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen are available from Perfect Books.

Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt (he/him) is from the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta. He won the Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection This Wound is a World. He has twice been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award—once in poetry for the debut and in non-fiction for his memoir, A History of My Brief Body. Both his works of fiction, A Minor Chorus and Coexistence, were national bestsellers. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

David Bergen

David Bergen is the author of numerous acclaimed novels and short-story collections, including The Time In Between, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Out of Mind, winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. Away from the Dead is his thirteenth book of fiction. He lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Mona Awad

Mona Awad is the bestselling author of the novels Rouge, All’s Well, Bunny, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl. She is a three-time finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award, the recipient of an Amazon Best First Novel Award, and she was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Bunny was a finalist for a New England Book Award and was named a Best Book of 2019 by Time, Vogue, and the New York Public Library. It is currently being developed for film with Bad Robot Productions. Rouge is being adapted for film by Fremantle and Sinestra. Margaret Atwood named Awad her “literary heir” in The New York Times’s T Magazine. She teaches fiction in the creative writing program at Syracuse University and is based in Boston.

Shani Mootoo

Shani Mootoo is the author of six novels, three collections of poetry, and one short story collection. She is a four-time Giller Prize nominee, and her work has been long and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Lambda Literary Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She has been awarded the Doctor of Letters honoris causa degree from Western University, is a recipient of Lambda Literary’s James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award, and Library and Archives Canada Scholar Award. Mootoo was born in Ireland, raised in Trinidad, and lives in Southern Ontario, Canada.

Souvankham Thammavongsa

Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of four poetry books and the short story collection, How to Pronounce Knife, winner of the 2020 Giller Prize and 2021 Trillium Book Award. Her stories have won an O. Henry Prize and appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Granta. Pick a Colour is her first novel.