Blue Metropolis Literary Festival
Blue Metropolis Literary Festival announces lineup
Kathryn Greenaway, The Gazette
Published: Monday, April 02, 2007
Margaret Atwood joins an international contingent of 290 writers, translators, cartoonists, storytellers and publishers for the five-day Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, which begins at the Delta Centre-Ville Hotel April 25.
Atwood receives the $10,000 Blue Metropolis Literary Grand Prize opening night and will participate in two onstage interviews, April 26 at 4 p.m. and April 27 at 8 p.m.
Free spirits is the theme of this year’s multilingual fest, created “by writers and readers for writers and readers.”
Yesterday, festival founder and artistic director Linda Leith stressed the event’s “inclusiveness,” its “openness to new ideas” and described it as a vehicle for discovery of “the writers you may not have read yet and the writers you may not have heard of yet.”
Panels, workshops, roundtables, readings and interviews will take place in Italian, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Inuktitut, French and English, touching on a vast array of subjects from discourses on the situation in the Middle East and the war in Iraq, April 28 at 12:30 or 8 p.m., to the launch of Michael Ondaatje’s latest book, Divisadero, April 28 at 8:30 p.m., to an evening of poetry and flamenco with Danielle Godin and Pierre Le Duc, April 27 at 6 p.m.
Or perhaps you might want o meet with Montreal writers making international waves of late – Rawi Hage, Heather O’Neill, Marie Hlne Poitras and Neil Smith – April 29 at 2:30 p.m.
For the first time this year, a delegation from China will participate. Shanghai-based authors Zhang Hong and Zhu Xiaolin meet with U.S. poet and novelist Ha Jin and Canadian journalist Bing He on April 29 at 3 p.m.
The festival opens with a chance for young writers to meet with 16 professional writers, including Melissa Auf de Maur, Alain Beaulieu and Monique Polak, at the Grande Bibliothque April 25 at 10 a.m. Reservations required.
Inuit elder Tivi Etok from Kangiqsualujjuaq tells traditional stories April 26 at 4:30 p.m., and Zhang drops by Babar en Ville bookstore, 1235A Greene Ave., for a reading on April 28 at 11 a.m.
The festival winds down with Gazette editorial cartoonist Aislin’s talk with Bizarro creator Dan Piraro on April 29 at 4 p.m. (Gazette columnist Bill Brownstein also participates in a panel about comedy, April 29 at 2 p.m.)
Blue Metropolis is at the Delta Centre-Ville Hotel, 777 University St., Square Victoria mtro, April 25 to 29. For program details, go to www.bluemetropolis.org, and watch for the program inserted in The Gazette April 14. For ticket info, call 514-790-1245, 1-800-361-4595 or go to www.admission.com. Discount passports available.
kgreenaway@thegazette.canwest.com
© The Gazette 2007
