Event Details
Celebrating first novels and fresh perspectives from three writers making their mark on the literary landscape.
Event Details
Celebrating first novels and fresh perspectives from three writers making their mark on the literary landscape.
Speakers for this event
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Arpita Ghosal
Arpita Ghosal
As a child, Arpita Ghosal pestered her storyteller grandmother for “just one more story” so incessantly that her mother taught her to read out of desperation. Her love of stories led her to a PhD in English literature, a career in public and post-secondary education, and a passion for arts journalism. Arpita writes constantly at Sesaya Arts Magazine (sesayarts.com), regularly interviewing artists and authors to help them share their stories. She works at the TDSB, where she has held various teaching and leadership roles. Her life as a mother to three remarkable children and a one-of-a-kind rescue dog yields wondrous stories and experiences. And she remains an avid reader with far too many books teetering on multiple surfaces.
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Jinwoo Park
Jinwoo Park
Jinwoo Park is a Korean Canadian writer based in Montreal. Born and raised in Seoul, he has lived in various parts of North America and the UK since the age of 11. He obtained his master’s in creative writing at the University of Oxford in 2015. In 2021 he won the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers’ Award from the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop. He has also been actively working as a literary translator after winning the Emerging Translator Award from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea in late 2023. Oxford Soju Club, published by Dundurn Press, is his first novel.
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Liz Johnston
Liz Johnston
LIZ JOHNSTON grew up in Revelstoke, B.C., and now lives and writes in Toronto. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Poets & Writers, The Fiddlehead, Grain, and The Cardiff Review, among other publications. She is an editor of Brick, A Literary Journal. The Fall-Down Effect is her debut novel.
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Tyson Stewart
Tyson Stewart
Tyson Stewart is an author of the Teme-Augama Anishnabai and an associate professor of Indigenous Studies at Nipissing University. He has delivered numerous lectures and presentations on Indigenous noir in media, exploring the genre’s historical influences and the concept of biskaabiiyang (returning to ourselves). The Return of the Nish is his debut novel.
Books
Oxford Soju Club
The natural enemy of a Korean is another Korean.
When North Korean spymaster Doha Kim is mysteriously killed in Oxford, his protégé, Yohan Kim, chases the only breadcrumb given to him in Doha’s last breath: “Soju Club, Dr. Ryu.” In the meantime, a Korean American CIA agent , Yunah Choi, races to salvage her investigation of the North Korean spy cell in the aftermath of the assassination. At the centre of it all is the Soju Club, the only Korean restaurant in Oxford, owned by Jihoon Lim, an immigrant from Seoul in search of a new life after suffering a tragedy. As different factions move in with their own agendas, their fates become entangled, resulting in a bitter struggle that will determine whose truth will triumph.
Oxford Soju Club weaves a tale of how immigrants in the Korean diaspora are forced to create identities to survive, and how in the end, they must shed those masks and seek their true selves.
AuthorJinwoo Park
PublisherDundurn Press
The Fall-Down Effect
Exploring protest, climate change, and fractured family relationships, Liz Johnston’s eagerly anticipated debut novel, The Fall-Down Effect, asks what we really owe people in our lives when we are fighting for a greater cause.
As a child in the late 1980s, Fern is the wild heart of her tree-hugging family—quick-tempered and yearning to spend every minute in the woods of the small Pacific Northwest logging town where they live. She is also most like her environmental activist mother, Lynn, who chafes against the demands of motherhood and yearns for the protests of her youth. As tensions escalate, Lynn leaves her partner, Tom, and their three children, telling herself she will devote her life more fully to fighting for the earth.
At nineteen, Fern commits her own radical act of protest, which authorities label ecoterrorism. When Fern goes underground, her parents and siblings—responsible grad student Sylvia and budding artist River—struggle to make sense of her actions while also trying to cover up her absence. Fern’s secret proves impossible to keep, and when she becomes a wanted woman, the rest of the family trades blame. Years later, when Lynn takes shelter from a forest fire in the home she left so many years before, the family is forced to confront their regrets during a fraught, baggage-filled reunion.
AuthorLiz Johnston
PublisherBook*hug Press
The Return of the Nish
“Tyson Stewart’s excellent first novel, The Return of the Nish, is a surprising tale, of good and bad, of sons and fathers, of what is the right path and what path to avoid. Smoothly written, it covers two generations of Anishinaabe men, and everything that entails. I found myself leaning forward as I read, anticipating what was going to happen next.” — Drew Hayden Taylor
Gerry Smith grew up in a small town about fifty-five kilometres from Temagami, the hometown of his long-absent father, Dale King. But he’s never met the once-legendary hockey player. Even after Gerry, as an adult, reconnects with his Anishinaabe relatives on his dad’s side of the family, Dale remains a mystery — a missing puzzle piece and a mythic villain. It’s not until his late twenties, juggling a commercial pilot career, a troubled marriage, and a young son of his own, that Gerry gets a call from Dale. Meeting for the first time in a dodgy sports bar in Toronto, Dale pitches Gerry on a dangerous but lucrative business venture, setting in motion an unlikely partnership that will test how far both father and son will go in the name of family.
Drawing on both Anishinaabe storytelling and film noir influences, The Return of the Nish explores the tragedy of lost opportunities, the cyclical nature of time, and how people and places return to us in new lights.
AuthorTyson Stewart
PublisherCormorant Books