By Rebecca Peng
Next week kicks off one of the most exciting events for literature lovers: the Vancouver Writers Fest. Running from October 15 to October 21, this year’s festival welcomes more than one hundred authors from around the world to participate in lively discussions about the weight and power of words. With that much going on, it can be difficult to decide which events to attend. To help you get started, here are five emerging talents from Canada and beyond, whose contributions to contemporary literature are already making waves.
Lindsay Wong
A finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, Lindsay Wong’s dark, hilarious memoir The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family, provides a fearless perspective on both mental illness and the Asian immigrant experience. Wong recounts her childhood and her family’s all-consuming fear of the “woo-woo”, malicious Chinese spirits, which at one point leads her mother to light Wong’s foot on fire in attempt to exorcise her. Both harrowing and heartfelt, Kevin Chong has praised Wong’s bold account of intergenerational trauma and mental illness as “the future of Asian Canadian writing.”
You’ll definitely want to hear Wong speak at The Things We Inherit on Saturday, October 20.
Javier Zamora
Javier Zamora is an up-and-coming poet from La Herradura, El Salvador, who earned his MFA from New York University. By the time Zamora was six years old, the tumultuous Salvadoran Civil War had led both of his parents to flee El Salvador for the United States. At nine years old, Zamora followed suit, travelling unaccompanied across 4,000 miles and multiple borders to reunite with his family. His debut poetry collection Unaccompanied combines the mythic and the personal and interrogates issues of race and immigration.
Zamora discusses literature’s ability to expose and heal social divides at the Politics & Prose panel on Thursday October, 18.
Sisonke Msimang
An incisive writer on race, gender and democracy, Sisonke Msimang combines all three themes in her powerful debut memoir Always Another Country, which follows her nomadic, international upbringing and political and feminist awakening. A frequent contributor on South African culture and politics for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian, Msimang is one of today’s most exciting and well-informed nonfiction writers.
Catch her not-to-be-missed conversation with Minelle Mahtani about place and politics on Tuesday, October 16.
Tommy Orange
Tommy Orange’s There There is an electric and ambitious bestseller and was called “the year’s most galvanizing debut novel” by Entertainment Weekly and “groundbreaking, extraordinary” by The New York Times. A member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, Orange’s debut features twelve unforgettable narrators who challenge expectations of homogenous Indigenous identity. Lyrical, angry and devastating, Orange’s voice is undeniably enthralling.
He will be discussing inequity and injustice in North America and fiction’s role in these great divides at A Nation Divided on Wednesday, October 17.
Uzma Jalaluddin
Toronto Star culture and parenting columnist Uzma Jalaluddin has turned her attention to the novel with her debut Ayesha At Last, a thoroughly modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice. Hailed as “smart, witty, romantic and utterly charming” by Canadian Living, Jalaluddin’s Elizabeth Bennet is the outspoken, hijab-wearing poet Ayesha who falls for the completely traditional Khalid. Facing family drama, community scandal and professional scrutiny, Ayesha At Last is a captivating romance that announces Jalaluddin as a dynamic new force in fiction.
She’ll take the stage for the Good Reads panel with several other formidable female authors on Sunday, October 21.
The Vancouver Writers fest will run from October 15 to October 21. To learn more about the festival’s more than 80 events, and to purchase your tickets, visit their website.