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Even more than books and magazines, The Word On The Street Toronto’s greatest passion is to connect with the community. Through a number of innovative programs, we are reaching out to encourage people to speak out, speak up, and support literacy.
On Saturday, September 16, 2017, book lovers were invited to an afternoon of readings and discussions at the Kitchener Public Library, to enjoy a selection of the Toronto festival’s top-billed authors in an intimate setting.
Attendees were able to purchase titles by the following authors from Words Worth Books.
Location:
Kitchener Public Library, Central Branch
85 Queen St. North, Kitchener ON
Time:
Saturday, September 16, 2017
1:00pm – 5:30pm
Schedule:
1:00pm – Event begins, hosted by CBC Radio’s Craig Norris
1:30 – 2:00 – Historical fiction reading and talk by Eva Stachniak (The Chosen Maiden)
2:00 – 3:00 – Non-fiction readings and discussion: Ayub Nuri (Being Kurdish in a Hostile World) and Tanya Talaga (Seven Fallen Feathers)
3:00 – 3:30 – Break / Book Signing
3:30 – 4:30 – Thrillers readings and discussion: Nick Cutter (Little Heaven), Nicole Lundrigan (The Substitute), Grace O’Connell (Be Ready for the Lightning)
4:30 – 5:30 – Book Signing
*To learn when these authors are will be at The Word On The Street Toronto, please click on their name.
Event Time: 1:30 PM - 2:00 PM
Eva Stachniak was born in Wroclaw, Poland. She came to Canada in 1981 and has worked for Radio Canada International and Sheridan College, where she taught English and Humanities. She is the bestselling author of The Winter Palace, Empress of the Night, Necessary Lies, and Garden of Venus.
The Chosen Maiden is the lush, sweeping story of a remarkable dancer who charts her own course through the tumultuous years of early twentieth-century Europe. Beautifully blending fiction with fact, it plunges readers into an artistic world upended by modernity, immersing them in the experiences of the era’s giants, from Anna Pavlova and Serge Diaghilev to Coco Chanel and Pablo Picasso.
Event Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM (with Tanya Talaga)
Ayub Nuri is a Canadian-Kurdish journalist who has worked as a war correspondent and political writer since 2003, covering the US invasion of Iraq, the insurgency and the war against ISIS. He has a BA in global politics and a master’s degree in journalism. He was born and raised in Halabja, Kurdistan. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Time magazine, BBC, Washington Post, Toronto Star, Rudaw Media Network. He has taught journalism at Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) in Iraq and held position of writer-in-residence at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and George Brown College in Toronto.
In Being Kurdish in a Hostile World, Ayub Nuri writes of growing up during the Iran-Iraq War, of Saddam Hussein’s chemical attack that killed thousands in his hometown, of civil war, of living in refugee camps, and of years of starvation that followed the UN’s sanctions. The story begins with the historical betrayal by the French and British that deprived the Kurds of a country of the own. Nuri recounts living through the 2003 American invasion and the collapse of Hussein’s totalitarian rule, and how, for a brief period, he felt optimism for the future. Then came bloody sectarian violence, and recently the harrowing ascent of ISIS, which Nuri reported on from Mosul.
Event Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM (with Ayub Nuri)
Tanya Talaga has been a journalist at the Toronto Star for twenty years, covering everything from general city news to education, national healthcare, foreign news, and Indigenous affairs. She has been nominated five times for the Governor General’s Michener Award in public service journalism. In 2015, she was part of a team that won a National Newspaper Award for a year-long project on Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls.
From 2000 to 2011, seven Indigenous high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The seven were hundreds of miles away from their families, forced to leave home because there was no high school on their reserves. Five were found dead in the rivers surrounding Lake Superior, below a sacred Indigenous site. Seven Fallen Feathers delves into the history of this northern city that has come to manifest Canada’s long struggle with human rights violations against Indigenous communities.
Event Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM (with Nick Cutter and Nicole Lundrigan)
Grace O’Connell is the author of The Globe and Mail Best Book Magnified World and 2014 winner of the Canadian Authors Association Emerging Writer Award. She holds an MFA in creative writing, and her work has appeared in various publications including The Walrus, Taddle Creek, The Globe and Mail, National Post and Elle Canada. She teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto and works as a freelance writer and editor.
From acclaimed New Face of Fiction alumna Grace O'Connell, Be Ready for the Lightning is a suspenseful, poignant and provocative tale about violence, sibling love, friendship, heroism--all told through the lens of a young woman trapped in a hijacked bus.
Event Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM (with Nick Cutter and Grace O'Connell)
Nicole Lundrigan is the author of five critically acclaimed novels, including Glass Boys and The Widow Tree. Her work has appeared on best of the year selections of the Globe and Mail and NOW Magazine and she has been long listed for the ReLit Award. Born in Ottawa and raised in Newfoundland, she now lives in Toronto.
Compared to The Girl on the Train meets We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Substitute is a finely crafted page-turner about a middle-school science teacher who innocently befriends one of his students. As the small community slowly turns against him, an anonymous narrator offers insight into past and present. This deliciously creepy thriller is a chilling look into the mind of a psychopath.
Event Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM (with Nicole Lundrigan and Grace O'Connell)
Nick Cutter is the national bestselling author of The Troop (winner of the James Herbert Award for Horror Writing), The Deep, and The Acolyte, and is a pseudonym for the author Craig Davidson, the acclaimed literary writer of novels such as Cataract City, Rust and Bone, and The Fighter.
Little Heaven is an epic tale of terror and redemption set in the hinterlands of mid-century New Mexico from the acclaimed author of The Troop – about which Stephen King raved “Scared the hell out of me and I couldn’t put it down…old-school horror at its best.”
Media Contact:
Melissa Shirley
647-389-9510
melissa@thewordonthestreet.ca