Blue Metropolis Premio Azul: Valeria Luiselli

I was very happy when Blue Met's Premio Azul was awarded to Mexican writer, Valeria Luiselli. I'd been trying for years to get her to come to Blue Met and this prize was the perfect way to entice her.

Currently in its fourth year, the prize is given to a writer whose work honours some aspect of Hispanophone culture. Often the prize is given for a work written in Spanish but there have been exceptions.

Junot Diaz won the prize last year and did an event at a sold out Rialto Theatre.

Luis Alberto Urrea won the prize in 2014. Nicaraguan writer, Sergio Ramirez, won in 2013.

Luiselli is one of Mexico's best-known and most talked about writers. Many critics called her fascinating book, The Story of My Teeth, one of 2015's best, and her earlier work, Faces in the Crowd, in my view, is one of the best novels written in the last ten years.

Everyone is always looking out for the next Marquez or the next Bolano and if that is anything worth doing, then keeping an eye on Luiselli's career can't go wrong. She's only in her early 30s and has already made a huge mark in the translated fiction world and even her first book to be translated into English, Sidewalks, explored the life and history of contemporary Mexico City via walking (introduced by Cees Noteboom) in a way that's fiercely intelligent, innovative and charming.

Luiselli will be given the prize on Friday, April 15 in the evening, interviewed by none other than Scott Esposito, editor and founder of The Quarterly Conversation and one of today's most respected young literary critics. Tickets are $10 and available here.

Luiselli will also be doing an event (#66 on page 56) on Mexican Modernism with Daniel Saldana Paris (another fantastic young writer to keep an eye on) as well as an event at Drawn & Quarterly with Anakana Schofield and Taras Grescoe. This event is called London, New York, Mexico City, Shanghai (#75 on page 57) and you can get more information by checking out the Blue Met 2016 Festival brochure.

Stories are All We Are

I've never really been able to understand how people who don't read books negotiate life. Yes, it's true today we have to carve out time, we have to shut out distractions, but books and the world of books has been such a vital and affirming way to negotiate the world for me - and many people I know - my entire life.

And it's not news but science backs up the notion that reading helps us understand and empathize with people. It's no surprise that people who don't read generally (IMHO) don't know as much about the world. And while on the one hand, reading anything is better than reading nothing, I still think that it's important to read novels, at least some of the time.

This fascinating story in The Atlantic about writers writing on solitude really struck a chord with me. We learn so much about life, about politics, about culture, through the reading of novels, not even overtly political novels. When I think about the current election, for example, all the hyperbole and bluster and media-shaping and outrage laid to the side, I'd much rather have a well-read leader than one who's made a billion dollars on some business deal.

But I suppose I am in the minority.

All of this to say that we try hard at Blue Met to bring writers in who appeal to all kinds of readers: we have short-story writers like Danielle McLaughlin (Ireland) and Ayelet Tsabari (Canada/Israel). We have non-fiction writers who look at gun culture (A.J. Somerset) and writers like Gabriella Coleman who wrote a fascinating book about Anonymous and hacker culture. We have big sweeping novels that explore generations of women (Christine Dwyer Hickey), books that make the political personal in funny and moving ways (Carmen Aguirre & Sunil Yapa), books that are edgy and experimental and give us new ways of thinking about what a novel actually is (Valeria Luiselli's latest book in English) and poetry that tells stories in the shape and form of a novel. Almost (Anne Carson). We have First Nations stories and migrants to Canada stories. We have stories by young women still trying to figure out their place in the world and we have told from the perspective of animals that teach us what it means to be human. Stories on others' lives, stories about childhoods and growing up different, stories that show us how to live in a world that wants to ridicule, even when greatness is the result of that difference. Stories that explore new histories, whether personal or public, and stories which are simply funny.

For those who love reading, there is so much on offer, new stories to help us continue to  make sense of the world. For those who used to read more and want to get back into it, there are plenty of new writers to explore. Check it all out at our website and block off your calendars: April 11-17 get ready for a whole new set of stories.

Anne Carson wins 2016 Blue Metropolis Literary Grand Prix

When The Autobiography of Red came out, this book traveled from friend to friend in my little circle of poetry nuts. Almost like a novel in verse form, the poems retells the myth of Geryon (which sounds far more precious and intellectual than the book actually is). This book changed my entire view of what poetry could do in contemporary society and it's often cited - even amongst my friends - as one of their favorite books, even people who don't consider themselves fans of poetry.

I immediately remembered this book and some of its lines when it was announced a while back that Anne Carson had won our Grand Literary Prix for 2016. I was excited because Carson has this amazing fan base: 22 year olds lover her, 75 year olds love her. This in itself is extraordinary but just about anyone who knows anything about American, Canadian or English-language literature knows her. This kind of writer, of course, is ideal for a Festival: she is a serious writer but one that is immensely popular.

The Autobiography of Red has been followed by many books that challenge our notions of what poetry can be, but also what art can be and how it can fit in our lives today. One thing I appreciate about the art of Carson is how she pushes form, she takes chances, she doesn't sit back and coast on reputation alone. She's published Fragments of Sappho, Decreation, Red Doc> (her titles tell one very little about the power of her work) and many more.

The themes she covers range from the nature of desire to grief to the nature of language and words. There is a cult-like aura about Anne Carson.

Carson will do two big events at the Festival. On Saturday, April 16 at 4:00pm, Writers and Company's Eleanor Wachtel will interview her on stage at the Grande Bibliotheque. She will receive the prize that night as well. Get your tickets here.

Later that evening, at 8:00pm at the Contemporary Art Museum, Carson will also be present at a staged reading of Antigonick, her highly entertaining and contemporary translation of Antigone. Get tickets here.

Blue Met's Grand Literary Prix is in being awarded for the 17th time this year and has gone to an illustrious group of writers from Carlos Fuentes to AS Byatt to Norman Mailer to Joyce Carol Oates to Colm Toibin. Carson joins the six other Canadians who've won the prize.

2016 Blue Metropolis Grand Literary Prize-winner

This year our Festival runs April 11 to 17 and a few Festival passes are still available online.

Blue Met announces its 2016 Festival lineup in Montreal

This morning we announce our entire 2016 lineup for the Blue Met 2016 Festival and wow are we excited! For one thing, an amazing roster of Canadian and international writers are here for the seven days of the Festival, but particularly from Wednesday, April 13 to Sunday, April 17 when the majority of our events take place. Highlights include:

• Anne Carson, winner of our 2016 Blue Metropolis Grand Literary Prix.
• Thomas King, winner of our 2016 Blue Met First Peoples Literary Prize.
• Valeria Luiselli, winner of our 2016 Premio Metropolis Azul.
• Abdourahman Waberi, winner of our 2016 Words to Change Prize.
• Ghayas Hachem, winner of our 2016 Conseil des arts de Montreal Diversity Prize.

Also coming in 2016: 

• Joseph Boyden, The Orenda, on the publication of his books into French
• Sunil Yapa, author of Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a First
• Carmen Aguirre, Canada Reads Winner launches her new book Mexican Hooker #1
• Daniel Tammet, Autistic savant and linguistic & mathematical genius
• Bernard Werber, one of the Francophone world's biggest names, on the launch of his new book
• Richard Blanco, American poet and author of Obama's inauguration poem and author of a new memoir about growing up gay in Miami in the 1980s
• Agata Tuszynska, Polish journalist and novelist, short-listed for France's Prix Femina for her novel La Fiancee de Bruno Schulz
• Jay Parini, author of The Last Station and a new biography of Gore Vidal
• Pierre Simenon, author of the memoir, De père à père, and the son of famed Maigret creator, Georges Simenon
• This Really Happened 2016, our online storytelling event
• Ayelet Tsabari, Israeli/Canadian author of the new collection, The Best Place on Earth
• Series on Irish writers (including Danielle McLaughlin, Sara Baume, Christine Dwyer Hickey and Paul Lynch)
• The return of our Translation Slam
• A series at the Contemporary Art Museum of Montreal (MAC)
• The Walrus Talks on Resilience
• Books, Body and Soul with events on health, healing, spirituality, throughout greater Montreal

The entire 2016 program is online now: check it out and get your tickets soon! The Festival runs April 11 to 17 at Hotel 10 downtown. More than half of our events are free; ticketed events range from $5 to $17.

Art and our Fears: The Witch and Bus Stops

I saw two events last week that  both seemed to explore our fears as a society but from very different eras and it's been something on my mind all week.

The first piece was the big high profile movie, The Witch, which has been playing for a few weeks. No fan of hardcore horror, I was a bit reluctant to see it but the setting - 15th century Massachusetts - was appealing. It's a very interesting movie though not really a horror film at all in most ways and the way it was marketed was very misleading. The film tells the story of a family - parents, two boys and two girls as well as a newborn baby - who are kicked out of their religiously oriented village for heresy (the father is preaching his own brand of Christian doctrine) and are exiled to the wilderness. They set up their farm there, isolated, next to the woods and things continue until one afternoon when the newborn simply vanishes. It's assumed that a wolf came out from the woods and took him away but there are suggestions of something darker.

What struck me about this film is how we forget today how the word evil used to represent an actual thing: actual spirits or the devil himself. For us, the word evil is used more metaphorically to suggest almost always a person who acts in selfish or incredibly self-serving ways that somehow cause harm to others or society. So we say that a serial killer or terribly manipulative person or someone who exploits the poor, etc., we say those people are evil. It's more about the lack of social empathy or the fact that the person can't act in a way that we accept as normal social behaviour. But in the world of 15th century America, evil was an actual thing that existed. It had little to do with social interaction or being selfish or not understanding how to act in accordance with mores of the day. Evil actually resided deep inside the forest, was a thing or a person that simply meant to cause disorder in the world.

It also struck me that it's so surprise why forests have long been so frightening to people. Today,

forests are almost like the last remnant of the nature we have managed to tame and control. But 500 years ago (and throughout most of human history), forests were terrifying places: full of wild animals and very easy to get lost in. People probably very often did enter forests and never return simply because they were so vast and dark.

The Witch is a good film but it's not a horror film and anyone who goes expecting this will be disappointed. It's a film about evil but also about the fears that we as a society cultivate: in our children, in each other.

I then saw Bus Stops at the Centaur and though the pieces on the surface are very different, they both share commonalities in terms of showing us what we fear. This play, translated from the original French, was written by Marilyn Perrault, and simply shows a collection of various urbanites all killed in a terrorist attack on a public bus in Montreal. The story is framed from the point of view of a coroner trying to piece together what happened after the fact via her imagined interaction with several of the victims, trying to separate the public hysteria from the facts.

The acting was spotty at times  (I saw the opening show so maybe it's gotten better: some players are solid; others were less so) but the play is good, the writing is interesting and engaging and the production itself is innovative and entertaining. But again, the play shows us what we fear as humans: we fear the "unknown" terrorist. Evil. But this kind of evil operates in a vastly different way to the evil in The Witch: this is social evil, people who act in selfish ways that harm others for some bigger political or personal axe to grind. It also gets at another fear: the tendency we have to scapegoat people for crimes because of racism or prejudice.

The Witch is playing downtown for the next couple of weeks and is worth a couple of hours though it's not a fast-moving film in many ways. It's dreary and sad but also scary. The script, too, is written in a very dated English so it's not always easy to follow the dialogue. But it's a good film and gets at the heart of what evil used to represent.

Bus Stops plays at Centaur through March 27 and is a very engaging story about our modern contemporary fears of evil.

Blue Metropolis 2016 lineup announced March 22

Some really exciting stuff coming up in April as we finalize the details for the 2016 Festival. As usual, we are at Hotel 10, on the corner of St-Laurent and Sherbrooke and on March 22 at 11am, we announce our entire 2016 Festival program including:

• Our Grand Literary Prize (past winners have included Mavis Gallant, Richard Ford, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, A.S. Byatt, among many others)
• Our Premio Azul for Spanish-language writing (past winners: Junot Díaz, Luis Alberto Urrea, Sergio Ramirez)
• Our First Peoples Literary Prize (last year's winner was poet Annharte)
• Our Words to Change Prize, a prize which honours a writer whose work connects communities (last year the winner was Gene Luen Yang of superman fame!).
  

We also have a long list of big name writers coming in from 10 countries, exploring all kinds of fun, smart and engaging topics.

The Festival runs April 11 to 17, 2016!

Stay tuned for March 22 when tickets go on sale!

Open Door by Iosi Havilio

Though he was at the Festival a few years ago, I came across Iosi Havilio's novel (translated into English in 2011), Open Door, which is such an excellent read.

The book is set in Argentina and gives us a glimpse into an unnamed narrator who returns home after a jaunt out in a northern village to visit a sick horse (she's a veterinary assistant), meets up with her girlfriend who suddenly disappears. The women are clearly having problems but when Aída goes into a shop in La Boca to buy cigarettes and never comes back out, a mystery of sorts opens up. In the short time after Aída goes into the shop, a person (maybe a man, maybe a woman) is on a bridge high above, surrounded by police and others trying to talk him or her down. A crowd gathers to watch and goad and click their tongues and when it seems that the person is, in fact, being talked down, suddenly the individual jumps and falls to a presumable death in the water. The central question is: was this Aída or not?

To call this book a thriller would be wildly misleading and, in fact, the best part of the book is the muted emotional response of the protagonist who goes on with life with almost no emotional reaction. She loses her job, and then without any explanation, returns to the village up north where she'd been visiting the sick horse the week before. There she falls in with an older man named Jaime and she becomes obsessed with a local teenaged girl who lives in the village.

It's such an austere story in many ways, mainly due to the lack of any kind of emotional response from the protagonist: she never reflects back on her life, her past, we know little to nothing about her childhood, her parents. All she does is push through life with no particular impulse driving her except sex (and even that is relatively infrequent). Occasionally, a phone call will come in from Buenos Aires, asking her to return to identify a body that's washed up but our heroine constantly ends up shaking her head. Where is Aída?

Sometimes a writer will come to the Festival and though I try to read as many Festival books as I can (I did read this 2-3 years ago), I will read it quickly without really revelling in it. Mainly that kind of reading is "trying to get a sense" of the book so that I know how to use the author. But it's in the months or years after the Festival that I will have time to read for the story, to revel in the language, to enjoy it.