The sun is shining, the snow has melted, and Blue Metropolis just announced their 2016 program. Spring has come to Montreal!
For those not familiar, Blue Met is the annual literary festival of the Blue Metropolis Foundation, which has been bringing people together in Montreal since 1997 to promote reading, writing, and education, focusing on a diverse range of authors and creators from Canada and around the world. While they spotlight Canadian authors, with five languages represented, the scope is undoubtedly international.
Blue Met’s commitment to linguistic and cultural diversity is seen foremost in the literary prizes they bestow. The Grand Prix littéraire is often given to a major Canadian writer – names like Margaret Atwood and Dany Laferrière – but also to international writers like Amitav Ghosh and Maryse Condé. This year’s winner is Anne Carson, which is very exciting particularly given the rarity of her public appearances.
The Mots Pour Changer/Words to Change Prize is presented to an author whose work particularly espouses intercultural understanding, and this year’s winner is Ivoirian Abdourahman Waberi, best known for his novel Les Etats-Unis d’Afrique. I’m perhaps most excited about seeing the winner of the Premio Metropolis Azul, Valeria Luiselli, author of the everyone’s-talking-about-it novel The Story of My Teeth.
This year’s First Nations Literary Prize goes to Thomas King, a Canadian author of Greek and Cherokee descent. And finally, the festival has instituted this year the Literary Diversity Prize for a First Publication, to be given to an “écrivain issu de l’immigration” (which is the French turn of phrase for “immigrant writer”) who lives in Montreal, and this year it will be the Ghayas Hacham for his novel Play Boys.
In Sigal Samuel’s recent novel The Mystics of Mile End everyone is looking for a message. There’s the Meyer family, with David interpreting the vague murmurs of his erratic heart; his son Lev deciphering the flower caught in his teacher’s bicycle; and his daughter Samara seeking keys to climb the Tree of Life in order to fulfill her Kabbalistic journey. Lev and Samara’s childhood friend Alex listens to everything from stars to dishwashers in the attempt to intercept messages from extraterrestrial life. And Mr. Katz hooks up a series of tin can telephones in his old oak tree presumably in order to receive messages from God.
