Event Details
Language shapes how stories are told, shared, and understood through a conversation on translation, identity, and the power of words
Event Details
Language shapes how stories are told, shared, and understood through a conversation on translation, identity, and the power of words
Speakers for this event
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Claire Foster
Claire Foster
Claire Foster is a reader, writer, and literary translator from French. She is also the manager of TYPE Books, where she works as a bookseller and events coordinator. Her writing and translations have appeared in Bookforum, The Kenyon Review, the Cleveland Review of Books, and other venues. Her translation of Valérie Manteau’s novel The Furrow (Prix Renaudot 2018) is forthcoming from Invisible Books. Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, she lives and works in Toronto.
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Didier Leclair
Didier Leclair
Didier Leclair is the pen name of Didier Kabagema, a Montreal-born author of Rwandan heritage who has lived in Toronto since 1987. He studied French literature at Laurentian University and Glendon College and has worked as a journalist, proofreader, and French language assessor. A celebrated novelist, he is the recipient of the Trillium Book Award and has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Awards and the Toronto Book Award.
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Michèle Anderson
Michèle Anderson
Michèle Anderson is a trilingual communications professional, with twenty years of experience in communications, writing, editing, translating, teaching, media, language and culture research. Having served as a senior communications consultant in academic, corporate and public sectors, she has recently returned to freelance teaching, research and editing. She is a member of Editors Canada and will be at the booth all weekend. She has a Master’s Degree in Communication and Culture, a Graduate Certificate in Asian Studies, a Bachelor of Arts in Communications Media, in Western Society and Culture, and Études Françaises, a Diploma in Chinese Language and Culture, and is currently completing a degree in East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. She edits fiction and non-fiction related to cultural translation.
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Sarah Moses
Sarah Moses
Sarah Moses is a writer and translator from Spanish and French. Her translations include Diving Board by Tomás Downey, Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, and Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Premio Valle Inclán, and the Best Translated Book Award. Forthcoming projects include stories by Guadalupe Dueñas and letters by Julio Cortázar, in a co-translation with Anne Mclean. Her collection of short fiction, Strange Water, was published in 2024. Sarah lives in Buenos Aires and Toronto, where she’s from.
Books
Diving Board
Tomás Downey writes from the edge of the abyss. A little girl disappears midair; a horse grows from a seed; a war widow receives a visit of condolence, over and over and over again. In “The Astronaut” a man has become weightless, bobbing around on the ceiling, nauseated every time he is brought down and tethered to the earth. But the question here is not “how” or “why,” it’s “what happens next?” The astronaut wonders “Will I burn like an asteroid or drown in the void of space?” just as all of Downey’s stories reside in that threatening, destabilizing moment when all connection is lost. The world is filled with an ever-thickening mist, an old love haunts the living, making fruit rot in the bowl, and resolution isn’t offered or even sought—the human condition is queasy, fretful, absurd. All we can hope for is the leap into the unknown.
AuthorTomás Downey, translated by Sarah Moses
PublisherInvisible Books
The African Prince
Originally written in French and translated into English by Howard Scott, The African Prince is a fast-paced historical thriller set in Paris during the Second World War under German occupation. The novel follows an African prince, his translator and their dangerous encounters with Nazi authorities, particularly a Gestapo officer. Through richly detailed depictions of wartime Paris, Didier Leclair centres Black and other marginalized characters whose courage, intelligence and resilience allow them to survive in a city controlled by an ideologically racist regime. Combining history with suspense, The African Prince offers a unique perspective on race, identity, and survival during one of history’s darkest periods.
AuthorDidier Leclair
PublisherMawenzi House Publishers
The Furrow
Published in France in 2018 to major acclaim, The Furrow follows a French writer living in Istanbul as she researches the life and death of Hrant Dink, the real-life Turkish-Armenian journalist, editor, and peace activist murdered in 2007. The novel blends a variety of genres into a feminist interpretation and defense of democracy, reinforcing the first-person narrator’s voice while simultaneously disintegrating it through a collective approach to narrative that splinters our expectations for who is telling what story, and why.
Winner of the prestigious Prix Renaudot, The Furrow arrives in English at a critical time in the contemporary zeitgeist, as authoritarianism becomes an ever greater presence across the world, and collective action an ever greater and more urgent response.
AuthorValérie Manteau, translated by Claire Foster
PublisherInvisible Books