Salman Rushdie, Anne Michaels and Madeleine Thien among writers at 2025 Blue Metropolis Festival in Montreal

CBC

16-04-2025

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Authors Salman Rushdie, Anne Michaels and Madeleine Thien will be featured at the annual Blue Metropolis Festival.
Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival is an annual multi-lingual literary festival in Montreal. It runs in-person from April 24-27, with online events starting mid-April. Bringing together authors and readers from around the world and across languages, this year's theme is "Time, the Tree, the Page."
Former Writers & Company host, Eleanor Wachtel, will host a new interview series which will include a discussion with Canadian author Madeleine Thien. This is a role reversal of the final original episode of Writers & Company where Thien interviewed Wachtel.
Rushdie is set to receive the 2025 Blue Metropolis Grand Prize. He will be interviewed by Wachtel on April 26 following a special conversation with Simon Sebag Montefiore on history, dreams and imagination.
Rushdie's fiction, notably the Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children, has brought him his greatest acclaim. His other novels include Shame, The Moor's Last Sigh and Victory City, which he completed shortly before the stabbing on a lecture stage at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York.
Rushdie has a collection of novellas and short stories coming out this fall, The Eleventh Hour, his first published fiction since being stabbed repeatedly and hospitalized in 2022.
In 1992, Salman Rushdie made a secret visit to Canada. Writers & Company looks back, 30 years later
In February, the 77-year-old Rushdie returned to the area and testified in the trial against his assailant, Hadi Matar. A jury found Matar guilty of assault and attempted murder, convictions that could lead to up to 25 years in prison. The judge has set sentencing for April 23.
Michaels will take part in two events on April 26; a panel on the art of translation as well as a conversation with Rachel Eliza Griffiths on the theme of "Is the time of art and fiction the same as human time?"
Based in Toronto, Michaels is a poet and author who has previously won major literary awards including the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Michaels won the 2024 Giller Prize for her novel Held. Before taking home last year's prize, she was shortlisted for the Giller Prize twice: in 1996 for Fugitive Pieces and in 2009 for The Winter Vault.
Thien's interview with Wachtel will be to discuss her latest book, The Book of Records, which is set to come out May 6, 2025.
Thien is a short story writer and novelist. She is the author of the novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Her debut novel, Certainty, published in 2006, won the Amazon First Novel Award and was a Globe and Mail Best Book. Thien is also the author of Dogs at the Perimeter, which was a Globe and Mail Best Book, and the children's book The Chinese Violin. Her first work of fiction, Simple Recipes, won four awards in Canada and was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
Other authors in attendance at this year's Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival include Niigaan Sinclair, Stephen Graham Jones, Peter Wohlleben and Alice Irene Whittaker.
Whittaker has been longlisted for all three CBC Literary Prizes. She was on the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize longlist, the 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist and she was also on the CBC Short Story Prize longlist in 2012.