The Only Journey with Andrew Westoll, Susan Perly and Steven Heighton

Hosted by Peter Schneider

In Person Fiction

Admission

Free

Tuesday

May , 2017

8:30pm

Eastern

Christ Church Cathedral

414 Sparks St. • Ottawa

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The Only Journey with Andrew Westoll, Susan Perly and Steven Heighton

Heighton is an experienced adventurer in literary form....A novel of big ideas and beautiful language.

The New York Times Book Review

Join us for a conversation with authors whose globe-spanning stories of danger and discovery bring to mind Rilke’s assertion that “the only journey in the one within.”

Andrew Westoll, winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, makes his Festival debut with his novel,The Jungle South of the Mountain. In an unnamed country on the northern coast of South America, a scientist named Stanley is deeply embedded in the life of the rainforest. He’s been studying a troop of capuchin monkeys for eight years—seven since his wife, Maria, left him, and their mentor, Professor Collymore, mysteriously disappeared.

Journalist, war correspondent and radio producer Susan Perly’s acclaimed second novel Death Valley is a sexy, fast-paced tale that's part Pynchon, part Tarantino and so radioactive you'll need a Geiger counter. Legendary war photographer Vivienne Pink has five days to photograph servicemen about to deploy for active combat. Accompanied by her husband, a celebrated novelist, and her best friend, a former CIA spook, Vivienne heads out into the Nevada desert in search of adrenaline, vengeance and the perfect shot.

From internationally acclaimed and Governor General’s Award-winning author Steven Heighton comes The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep, a passionate novel of buried secrets, the repercussions of war and finding love among the ruins.

Books available for purchase at every event: Proceeds support our free children’s literacy programs.

The Authors

Andrew Westoll

Andrew Westoll is an award-winning author, journalist and teacher based in Toronto. A former primatologist-in-training, Andrew traded the real jungle for the concrete one a long time ago, but his experiences with wild animals still inform his work. Most of his writing explores one corner or another of our fraught, curious and ever-evolving relationship with the natural world.Andrew's first book, The Riverbones, is a travelogue set in the remote jungles of Suriname, where he once spent a year studying wild capuchin monkeys. His second book, the national-bestselling The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, is the biography of a family of chimpanzees who were rescued from a research laboratory and retired to an animal sanctuary near Montreal. The Chimps won the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, was a finalist for several other major book awards, and was named a Book of the Year by the Globe and Mail, Amazon.ca, Quill and Quire and CTV's Canada AM.Andrew is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, of Creative Writing and English at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where in 2014 he was honoured as a Professor of the Year by the Underground student newspaper. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, is a Gold National Magazine Award winner, and his feature writing regularly appears in premier venues in Canada and around the world. His books have been published in the USA, UK, Australia and Poland, and his work has been anthologized in Cabin Fever: The Best New Canadian Non-Fiction.Andrew's debut novel, The Jungle South of the Mountain, was published in the fall of 2016.

Steven Heighton

Steven Heighton’s most recent books are The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep, a novel that has just been optioned for film, and The Waking Comes Late, which received the 2016 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. His work has received four gold National Magazine Awards and has appeared in Granta, Tin House, Zoetrope, London Review of Books, Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Poetry, TLR, and five editions of Best Canadian Stories. His novel Afterlands was cited on year-end lists in the USA, the UK, and Canada, and is in pre-production for film. In 2020 he will publish two books, a nonfiction account of the Middle Eastern refugee influx on Lesvos, Greece, and a children's book drawing on the same events. Heighton is also a translator, an occasional teacher, and a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review.

Susan Perly

Susan Perly has worked as a journalist, war correspondent and radio producer for the CBC. In the early ’80s her Letters from Latin America for Peter Gzowski’s Morningside reported from locales such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Chiapas. During the Iran-Iraq war she broadcast Letters from Baghdad, and she produced many documentaries for the weekly program Sunday Morning. Perly is the author of the jazz novel Love Street, and her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. She lives in Toronto with her husband, the poet Dennis Lee.