2024 Festival:
October 21–27
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Incite: Sheila Heti in Conversation with Billy-Ray Belcourt

Presented in partnership with Vancouver Public Library and TELUS.

Sheila Heti, internationally acclaimed author of the novel Motherhood, a New York Times Best Book of the Year, joins our next Incite event with her tenth book, Pure Colour. This latest work is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and a shape-shifting epic; Esquire called it one of the Best Books of 2022 to “Provoke, Persuade and Perturb You.” A philosopher of modern experience, Heti has reimagined what a book can hold. On March 9, she’ll share the secrets of Pure Colour with Griffin Poetry Prize-winning author Billy-Ray Belcourt.

Pure Colour is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. The Guardian called it a “mystical, wildly original study of grief and love”, and “a book that says something new for our difficult times.” As Kirkus Reviews put it, this is “that rarest of novels—as alien as a moon rock and every bit as wondrous.” Join us at this live, virtual event to be put under the spell of Heti’s luminous creation myth, which has been included in lists of the most anticipated new books by The Globe and Mail, CBC Books, Publishers Weekly, The A.V. Club, Vulture, and more.

Incite events are free and open to the public, but an RSVP is required. We encourage you to pick up Pure Colour at your favourite independent bookseller.

This is an online, live event. 

Participants and Speakers

Sheila Heti

SHEILA HETI is the author of ten books, including the novels Motherhood, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and How Should a Person Be?, which New York magazine deemed one of the “New Classics” of the twenty-first century. She was named one of the “New Vanguard” by the New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018. Her books have been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto and Kawartha Lakes, Ontario.

Billy-Ray Belcourt

BILLY-RAY BELCOURT is a poet, author, and scholar from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound Is a World, which was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. His third book, A History of my Brief Body, was a Globe & Mail Best Book and a finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Belcourt is a recipient of the prestigious Rhodes scholarship and an Indspire Award, the highest honour the Indigenous community bestows on its leaders. His fourth book, A Minor Chorus, was long listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.