LiterASIAN Toronto 2024: Recovery

Join us for the LiterASIAN Writers Festival in Toronto! 

Sold Out - We are pleased to invite you to the LiterASIAN Toronto 2024 event, hosted at the Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library in collaboration with The Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop (ACWW). This year’s theme is Recovery, where writers engage in a literary dialogue towards fostering cultural understanding, promoting diversity, and amplifying Asian Canadian voices. Through exploration, the panelists collectively navigate pathways towards recovery. This event is free, and all are welcome to attend. Space is limited, registration is required in advance by MAY 15^th.

LiterASIAN is a proud celebration of Canadian writers and artists of Asian heritage and their valuable contributions to Canada’s amazing literary and artistic scenes.  

Panelists 

Marjorie Chan was born in Toronto. She is a writer, director and dramaturge in opera and theatre. Her published works include her plays China Doll, and Lady Sunrise, both nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Other produced plays include A Nanking Winter, The Madness of the Square, Tails from the City, and most recently The Year of the Cello, co-created with composer Njo Kong Kie. Her writing for opera includes Sanctuary Song, The Lesson of Da Ji, M’dea Undone, The Monkiest King, and The Nightingale of A Thousand Songs. Nominated for ten Dora Awards variously as a writer, actor, director, and the recipient of four. Marjorie has also received the K.M. Hunter Artists Award, Entertainment World Award (Best New Work), Harold Award, Bra D’Or Award, as well as the George Luscombe Award for Mentorship. Currently, she is adapting the novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien into an opera with composer Tim Brady. Marjorie is also the Artistic Director of Theatre Passe Muraille, with a focus on innovative new Canadian works in Toronto. 

Denise Chong is the author of prize-winning books that portray the lives of ordinary people caught in the eye of history. She is best known for her family memoir, The Concubine's Children, which is being adapted for film. Her previous books include The Girl in the Picture, about the napalm girl of the Vietnam War; Egg on Mao, a story of love and defiance in China of 1989; and Lives of the Family: Stories of Fate and Circumstance, about Chinese who immigrated to Canada in the mid-20th century. In 2013, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada for "writing books that raise our social consciousness." She currently lives in Ottawa. 

Janika Oza is the author of the novel A History of Burning, winner of the 2024 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a finalist for the 2023 Governor General's Award for Fiction, and a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She is the winner of a 2022 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction and the 2020 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Award. She is an assistant editor at The Rumpus and lives in Toronto. 

Linda Rui Feng is Associate Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto. Her research in Chinese cultural history often takes her to long-forgotten books from the ninth century and, more recently, the history of scent and aromatics. She is the author of the novel Swimming Back to Trout River, which was longlisted for the 2021 Scotia Giller Prize, and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the 2022 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her fiction has been supported by residencies at MacDowell and by the Toronto Arts Council, and her prose and poetry have appeared in journals such as The Fiddlehead, Kenyon Review Online, and Washington Square Review. 

Moderator 

Larissa Lai is the author of nine books, including-The Lost Century, The Tiger Flu, Salt Fish Girl, and Iron Goddess of Mercy. She is the recipient of the Jim Duggins Novelist's Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Astraea Award, and the Otherwise Honor Book. She has also been a finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Governor General's Award. She has held a Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary and a Maria Zambrano Fellowship at the University of Huelva. Currently, she holds the Richard Charles Lee Chair of Chinese Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto. 

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