Williams talks love at writers fest
September 21st, 2020
UBC poetry professor Ian Williams (right) will be in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winner Marilynn Robinson about her new novel Jack (Farrar Straus & Giroux 2020) at a Vancouver Writers Festival podcast on Saturday, October 24.
Jack is the fourth in Robinson’s Gilead quartet set in post-World War II rural Iowa in the United States. The new installment is about a polarizing love story between a dissolute white American World War II veteran and a Black high school teacher, set against a culture of segregation.
Ian Williams’ Giller Prize-winning debut novel, Reproduction (Penguin Random House 2019) is a love story with some similarities in that it includes issues like the Nazi Holocaust and colonial poverty.
Of his novel, Williams says “…it should be read like a good love story. That’s the only thing I want to read and write, or care about in people’s lives.”
Billy-Ray Belcourt
Also, on October 24, live on Zoom, is the festival’s popular “The Literary Cabaret” with B.C.’s Griffin-poetry prize winning Billy-Ray Belcourt reading from A History of My Brief Body (Penguin Random House 2020); Jillian Christmas preaching The Gospel of Breaking (Arsenal Pulp 2020); Charles Demers reading from his crime fiction, Primary Obsessions (D&M 2020); and Aislinn Hunter on her new novel The Certainties (Knopf 2020).
francesca ekwuyasi
The following morning, Sunday October 25 live on Zoom is the fest’s signature event, “The Afternoon Tea” with readings from Caroline Adderson from her new book, A Russian Sister (Viking 2020); francesca ekwuyasi on her Giller-nominated Butter Honey Pig Bread (Arsenal 2020); Will Ferguson reading from The Finder (Simon & Schuster 2020); Michelle Good reading from Five Little Indians (Harper Collins 2020); Kevin Spenst on his poetry in Hearts Amok (Anvil 2020); and Jack Wang from We Two Alone (Anansi 2020).
For more information about the Vancouver International Writers Festival, please visit: https://writersfest.bc.ca/2020-festival/
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