Sunday October 27th, 2013 International Festival of Authors

Thunder Bay Public Library, Lakehead University and Northern Woman's Bookstore are once again proud to be local sponsors/supporters of the International Festival of Authors, 3rd Annual Lit on Tour reading happening November 5 at the Airlane Hotel.  This is a fabulous opportunity for local and regional residents to be "up close and personal" with world renown authors.  When the authors visit as part of the festival, not only do they enrich the community through their public readings but they also present a "master class" at Lakehead University  providing insight and knowledge transfer to English students and local writers alike! For 2013, we have the additional infusion of a visit by the Humber School of Writers which will be conducting a weekend mini-writing workshop event through author Joe Kertes (a Dean with the Humber School).  Add to these events, the long-standing efforts of the Northern Ontario Writer's Workshop and Sleeping Giant Writers Festival and Thunder Bay has achieved the status of a literary destination!

This year we will have the pleasure of readings by Vincent Lam, Ania Szado and Robert J. Sawyer with the evening emceed by the ever gracious Lisa Laco of CBC Radio One 88.3FM.  It is sure to be a great night - tickets are just $10 and available at the Waverley and Brodie libraries and the Northern Woman's Bookstore.

Here's more about the authors visiting this year and we hope to see you there:

Dr. Vincent Lam is from the expatriate Chinese community of Vietnam. He is an emergency physician and a lecturer with the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto, and has also worked in international air evacuation and expedition medicine on Arctic and Antarctic ships. Lam’s first book, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize and has recently been adapted for television and broadcast on HBO Canada. Lam presents his most recent novel, The Headmaster's Wager, the story of Percival Chen, a gambling, womanizing headmaster at a prestigious English school in Saigon during the Vietnam War.

Robert J. Sawyer is the only Canadian to have won all three of the top international science fiction awards: the Nebula Award, Hugo Award and John W. Campbell Award. He has published over 20 novels, including Triggers and the novels of the WWW trilogy. His novel Flashforward was adapted for an ABC TV series of the same name. Sawyer presents his most recent novel, Red Planet Blues. Protagonist Alex Lomax is a lone private eye in a Martian frontier town who stumbles upon clues to a decades-old unsolved murder – and a journal that might lead him to a legendary Martian fossil mother lode.

Ania Szado is the author of Beginning of Was, which was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and nominated for the international Kiriyama Prize. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Journey Prize and the National Magazine Awards. Szado presents Studio Saint-Ex, which finds The Little Prince author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, within a tempestuous love triangle in WWII Manhattan’s glittering French expat community and emerging fashion scene.

Barbara Philp