Kingston WritersFest’s Best Year Yet

Kingston’s Readers and Writers Festival one of the best in the country

FOR RELEASE: August 7, 2014

Kingston, ON: Kingston WritersFest (www.kingstonwritersfest.ca) tickets are on sale now for the 2014 Festival of five nights and four days of onstage events, September 24–28, featuring 60 authors from Kingston, Canada, and the world.

Wally Lamb, interviewed by CBC’s Michael Enright, opens the Festival on Wednesday, September 24, in the International Marquee. His international best-selling We Are Water is complex, filled with slowly revealed secrets and the damage they cause, and told through characters so real that it’s impossible to believe they are not about to walk through the door and interrupt your reading.

On Sunday, September 28, the Festival closes with the Robertson Davies Lecture featuring Wayson Choy, one of Canada’s most renowned authors and a member of the Order of Canada. Wayson’s writing often illuminates the first-generation immigrant experience. His latest book, Not Yet: A Memoir of Living and Almost Dying is framed by Wayson’s two near-deaths due to heart attacks suffered four years apart and is a “harrowing, enthralling and incandescent memoir” (Edmonton Journal).

Events have been bundled into themes this year, including Planet Earth, Canada Made Me, Memories of Kingston Pen, and The Heroic Redefined. In Planet Earth events, Chris Tuner, Jennifer Cockrall-King, Trevor, Herriot, Diana Beresford-Kroeger and others discuss the future of the planet. In Memories of Kingston Pen, reformed bank robber Stephen Reid, photographer Geoffrey James, and Wally Lamb and Susan Musgrave, both of whom, as volunteers have taught writing to prisoners talk cages and pens. In Canada Made Me, identity and nationality are spotlighted with authors including Eleanor Catton and Kate Pullinger, Shani Mootoo and Cecil Foster. In a Kingston WritersFest first, Kim Thúy’s event will be en français. In Heroic Redefined events, heroes from the worlds of politics, poetry, sport, and fantasy are examined. Poets George Elliott Clarke, Sandy Poole, and others address poetry in two events, Stephen Brunt discusses Jordin Tootoo, Brad Cran looks at changing the world and Lesley Livingston looks at the creation of new heroes in new worlds.

For the full roster of authors »

Tickets go on sale August 7 at the Grand Theatre Box Office.