| You may know Yann Martel as the philosophically imaginative author of last year’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Life of Pi. But if you’re lucky enough to get to Paris anytime soon, and you drop by an event at the Canadian Cultural Centre there (where, to get a glass of wine, you have to fight those thirsty ladies of a certain age known as "countesses" who swarm the bar at every free opening), you may learn that it hasn’t been long since staff there knew Martel as their friendly security officer. Just one more step along the peripatetic route that got Martel through the writing of his first two books, Self and The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios.
I admit that this rather slight bio-factoid comes to me courtesy of plain old hearsay – but out of a desire for accuracy in the least relevant matters, I’ll try to verify it with the author himself when he reads next Thursday, October 30 in the John Dutton Theatre at the main branch of the Calgary Public Library. The reading starts at 7 p.m. and admission is free.
Such details of Martel’s pre-Booker existence seem charmingly innocuous alongside what has been revealed about this year’s winner, DBC Pierre. As you may already have read, before writing his novel Vernon God Little, Pierre dabbled in cartooning, cocaine-induced swindling and "Mexican testosterone" (even more trouble than the regular kind)! For more on Pierre – who is not appearing in Calgary – just read his Guardian interview at http://books.guardian.co.uk.
All this talk of biography – can it ever be avoided? Not if the work is a memoir and you’re Maureen McTeer and you’ve lived a public life for nearly 30 years. McTeer reads from her new memoir, In My Own Name, on Wednesday, November 5 at 7:30 p.m. in the John Dutton Theatre. Tickets are available at Pages bookstore or by calling 283-6655. One dollar from each ticket supports the Calgary Foundation.
The foundation uses some of its funds to offer the annual Brenda Strathern "Late Bloomers" writing prize. This year’s winner – announced at WordFest on October 16 – is Lucille Gnanasihamany, a 43-year-old Calgary writer. The $5,000 prize is named for the late Strathern, a Calgarian who began writing in her 40s, and is given annually to a local writer who is at least 40 and working on the completion and publication of his or her first book of fiction. |
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