Blue Met 2016

It's been a great year for us at Blue Met. Our 2015 Festival was our largest Festival yet in terms of attendance. In the five years since I've been at Blue Met our attendance has tripled. Yes, tripled. Which has, I think, something to do with the programming. In addition, our media attention has been solid, as well, with local, national and international attention.

This blog, too, has been getting pretty extraordinary traffic though it's slacked off the last couple of months since I've not had as much time to write here. But in the late summer and early fall it was booming...and that's carried over though I do blog less lately.

Still: the end of the year is a normal if rather arbitrary time to consider where we have been and where we are going.

In terms of reading, this was a great year for fiction. Some books I read that I really enjoyed included:

Valeria Luiselli: The Story of My Teeth
Elena Ferrante: The Story of the Lost Child
Drago Jancar: The Tree With No Name
Tomaž Šalamun: Woods and Chalices
Anakana Schofield: Martin John
Mary Oliver: Felicity
Jean-Christophe Rufin: The Red Collar

I also liked Larry Tremblay's book The Orange Grove, Neil Smith's novel Boo, and Samuel Archibald's excellent story collection, Arvida.

It feels like 2015 had some really fascinating new things, new forms and experiments by writers that always excites us around the office.

With our 2016 Festival planning in its final stages, we've been reading and discussing many fascinating books in Quebec, Canada and around the world to bring you some great events in 2016.

Our 2016 Festival will have a lot of works relating to translation, a lot of writers from outside North America (as usual) and events in many different languages, of course (again, as usual), including Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Polish and many others.

The 2016 Festival runs April 11-17 at Hotel 10 in downtown Montreal. Mark your calendars!