Latest news with #BlueMetropolisInternationalLiteraryFestival
Montreal Gazette
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Montreal Gazette
Nationalism can be a positive or negative force, Salman Rushdie says
By In the Hotel 10 basement on Sherbrooke St., security guards inspected a procession of writers, editors and literature lovers as they arrived at a literary roundtable discussion. The security was high because this wasn't just any literary event. One of the panellists, author Salman Rushdie, was attacked with a knife in 2022 as he was about to give a public lecture in New York, leaving him blind in one eye. 'Two and a half years ago was a bad audience,' the 77-year-old author joked at his talk on Saturday afternoon, while wearing his signature glasses with a black-tinted right lens. The Indian-born author was the object of multiple death threats and assassination attempts after the publication of his famous 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. His most recent autobiographical work from 2024, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, recounts the stabbing attack. Rushdie's upcoming novella collection, The Eleventh Hour, is scheduled to be published this fall. Rushdie was in Montreal for the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, where he was awarded the Grand Prix Award for a lifetime of literary achievement and interviewed by longtime CBC Radio host Eleanor Wachtel. The Blue Metropolis Grand Prix is given each year to a world-renowned author, accompanied by a $10,000 grant. Earlier in the day, Rushdie gave a talk with historian Simon Sebag Montefiore around themes of history, dreams and imagination. At the talk, Rushdie discussed his complicated feelings toward growing Canadian nationalism, which has spiked in reaction to annexation threats from the United States. '(It's a) very odd word, 'nationalism,' because there are contexts in which it's been a very positive force. For example, the growth of the nationalist movement in India is what ended up getting rid of the British Empire, and I can see that as a kind of almost entirely positive thing,' he said. 'But there are other parts of the world where nationalism has become associated with more primitive kinds of right-wing politics. So it's mixed. It's a word that you have to be careful about.' Rushdie also spoke about how history offers lessons on staying optimistic, even during challenging times. 'One of the things that the study of history taught me was that there's nothing inevitable about history. You know, history doesn't run on tram lines, and enormous changes are possible at very short notice,' he said. 'In all these changes at short notice ... I think that doesn't necessarily mean things get better, they can get worse. But at least it means that change is constant.' While Rushdie has long explored the lessons of history in his work, he noted that the broader public often fails to do the same. 'To take only recent history, the second election of Donald Trump. If you have the example of the first presidency of Donald Trump, then you should learn from that. But instead, everybody learned the wrong lesson. And now you get all these statements in the press of kind of buyer's remorse, people who voted for Trump regretting it.' The Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival runs until 6 p.m. on Sunday, and will hold both in-person panels at the Hotel 10 as well as online programming.
Montreal Gazette
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Montreal Gazette
Friday on My Mind: Blue Metropolis, a Strokes cover band, Mean Girls top cool agenda
Friday on My Mind is a highly subjective, curated rundown of five of the cooler things happening in Montreal on the weekend. Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival Friday to Sunday at Hotel 10. There are many intriguing authors to check out at this year's Blue Metropolis, but arguably the hottest ticket is Salman Rushdie. The Indian-born author — best-known for his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses — will be given the Blue Met's 2025 Grand Prix on Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Hotel 10 and at the event he will interviewed by longtime CBC Radio host Eleanor Wachtel. 'He's a great author and the goal of the festival has always to bring together writers with different points of view,' said Blue Met director of programming Marie-Andrée Lamontagne. 'Salman Rushdie has become an icon of freedom of expression because of some tragic circumstances. He's also just published a remarkable book, which is why we want to give him the Grand Prix. He receives it for his work but also as someone who represents freedom of expression and freedom of the imagination. These things are particularly important in the era we're living in right now.' Rushdie was the object of several assassination attempts and many death threats after the publication of The Satantic Verses and he survived a stabbing in New York in 2022 that resulted in the loss of his left eye. Last year he published an autobiographical book inspired by that vicious attack, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Other authors set to take part in the literary festival include British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, German author Peter Wohlleben, and American novelist Stephen Graham Jones. Wachtel will also interview Montreal author Madeleine Thien, whose latest novel The Book of Records comes out May 6. Lamontagne underlines that the fest continues the mission of founder Linda Leith to try to bring the city's anglo and franco literary communities together. 'This is important for me personally and for Blue Metropolis,' said Lamontagne. 'There is programming in English and programming in French. I also like to program bilingual events whenever possible with bilingual hosts. Language should never be an obstacle. Blue Metropolis is all about the circulation of languages.' Tickets and info: Gala Dynastie This is the ninth edition of the annual gala that rewards artists, creators and personalities from Black communities in the province. This year's ceremony is hosted by comedian Garihanna Jean-Louis. The evening will also include a tribute to Quebec comic Anthony Kavannagh. Tickets: View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Brokes (@ The Brokes Saturday at 8:30 p.m. at Fairmount Theatre. All you need to know to sell you on this one is the band's Instagram tag line: 'Too broke to Stroke? Try ... The Brokes.' The Brokes are a Strokes cover band from Toronto (of all places, just seems like the least Strokes-like city!) who pay tribute to the legendary too-cool Manhattan garage band from the early aughts. In a New York Times piece on them last year, one fan said: 'Being here feels like being at a Strokes nerd fest. The Brokes play deep cuts, songs the Strokes would never play live at some big stadium today.' 'Nuff said. Strokes nerds are thus alerted! Tickets: South Asian Film Festival Friday to Sunday at the DeSève Cinema in Concordia's Webster Library Building. Don't tell Donald Trump. This week's film fest — yes there is apparently one every single week of the year — proclaims in its press materials that 'Diversity, equity, inclusion and cinematographic merit' power its programming choices! Shocking, I know. Kidding aside, it's another popular film festival that provides a welcome alternative to the Hollywood shlock at the nearby multiplex. Shambhala, for example, the opening-night film, is set in a Himalayan village in Nepal and tells the story of a pregnant woman who heads out on a quest to find her husband who has gone missing. Mean Girls Friday to Sunday at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier of Place des Arts. This is the first time in Montreal you get to see a touring version of the hit critically acclaimed Broadway musical based on the Hollywood flick of the same name penned by Saturday Night Live's Tina Fey. There's undoubtedly an audience for this but me I'm not a musicals kind of guy and I didn't become any more enthused when I read the last line of The Guardian's review of the original Broadway production: 'Here's the best/worst thing you can say about Mean Girls: it's nice.'
CBC
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Salman Rushdie, Anne Michaels and Madeleine Thien among writers at 2025 Blue Metropolis Festival in Montreal
Social Sharing 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.
