Event Details
Exploring the choices, beliefs, and struggles that shape heroes and monsters alike.
Event Details
Exploring the choices, beliefs, and struggles that shape heroes and monsters alike.
Speakers for this event
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A.D.Sui
A.D.Sui
A.D. Sui is a Ukrainian-born, internationally raised speculative writer, Nebula winner, and Aurora, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist.They are the author of The Dragonfly Gambit (2024), The Iron Garden Sutra (2026), and more than two dozen short stories.A failed academic and retired fencer, they spend most days wrangling their two dogs and tending to their myriads of tropical plants.
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H.G. Watson
H.G. Watson
H.G. Watson is a writer based in Toronto.Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Vice, Toronto Life, Toronto Star, Canadian Business, Chatelaine, The Narwhal, and many more. She has a newsletter called Plucky, where she writes about media and feminism. She’s also researching a book about the teen mags of the 1990s and 2000s.Watson teaches journalism and writing at universities and colleges around Toronto, including advanced courses on multimedia production and creative nonfiction.In 2025, Watson graduated from the Stonecoast MFA program in creative writing at the University of Southern Maine. When she’s not writing or reading, you can find her hiking or walking her dog around Toronto.
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Nick Cutter
Nick Cutter
Nick Cutter is the author of The Troop, as well as The Deep and Little Heaven and others. Nick Cutter is the pseudonym for Craig Davidson, whose literary fiction includes Rust and Bone, The Saturday Night Ghost Club, and, most recently, the short story collection Cascade.
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Russell Smith
Russell Smith
Russell Smith’s most recent novel is Self Care (Biblioasis). A former arts columnist at the Globe and Mail and CBC Radio host (And Sometimes Y), he now co-hosts the Soluble Fish lecture series on the arts. He is is an editor-at-large at Dundurn Press/Rare Machines, and is the editor of the short fiction anthology Monsters (Rare Machines).
Books
Monsters: An Anthology of Short Fiction
A bold, unsettling, and sinister collection of stories that asks what monster means.
What is a monster? The word encompasses the grotesque, the immoral, or the merely wondrous. Mythical creatures, corrupt executives, and cruel exes are all monsters. Monsters live among us. Sometimes the monster is us.
What do monsters mean to writers? Here is a literary grab-bag: fourteen writers from diverse genres — literary, mystery, horror, the experimental — interpret monsters either literal or metaphorical. The result is a snapshot of contemporary fiction.
Stories from: Sifton Tracey Anipare, Steve Burrows, Brenda Chapman, Chinenye Emezie, Barbara Fradkin, Zsuzsi Gartner, Liz Harmer, Babak Lakghomi, Pasha Malla, Andrew Pyper, Naben Ruthnum, Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson, Andrew Sullivan, and Emily A. Weedon.
AuthorEdited by Russell Smith
PublisherRare Machines (Dundurn Press)
Our Infinite and Inevitable Ends
This sapphic cli-fi thriller is a love letter to hope in the bleakest of times, combining the multiverse-bending drama of This Is How You Lose the Time War with the cat-and-mouse chase of Killing Eve.
On a near-future Earth devastated by climate change, Dr. Cassandra Barlowe is right where she wants to be: working on an island of floating trash in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as far away from Dr. Yana Gulsvig as possible. Cas’s research on plastic-dissolving fungi is undervalued and underfunded, thanks to the invention of deleria, a drug that allows glimpses into different timelines. For the average user, it’s a way to view lost loved ones or experience a different life, but it also offers a glimpse into worlds where humanity has solved its many global crises. Now, most science funding is dedicated to trawling these different timelines, searching for a reality with the solution to the climate devastation.
But when Yana — the world’s leading expert on deleria and Cassandra’s ex-lover — is killed in a mysterious explosion in the hub of deleria research, taking the hope of reversing climate change with her, Cas is arrested on charges of domestic terrorism. Cas must delve through timelines to piece together what happened, while watching other versions of herself and Yana live out the life they could have had — happier, more in love. As brutal government agents close in and her addiction to deleria grows, Cas has to make a choice: live in the spiraling branches of reality, seeking closure for Yana’s death until the drug shatters her mind, or live in the now, even if that means embracing her own damaged self and fighting, however hopelessly, for her own future and that of humanity.
AuthorA.D. Sui
PublisherECW Press
The Dorians
On a remote island in the Canadian wilderness, five elderly volunteers from different walks of life are given a tantalizing offer: to stall their biological clocks or even reverse them, restoring their lost youth. The chance to put death on pause—forever, perhaps.
AuthorNick Cutter
PublisherSimon & Schuster Canada
Partners
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