Each of the collections shared by the authors in today’s event thrum with imagination, tension, and poignancy. Together, the three writers on stage today have bylines in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Granta, Maclean’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Electric Literature. Together, they probe themes interwoven in their works— themes of survival, belonging, identity, and navigating modern day tribulations of the Anthropocene.
PEN/Hemingway Award finalist Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is one of this year’s hottest titles. Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You was described by Kirkus as “a sharp and inventive debut,” while story veteran and Giller-finalist Alexander MacLeod shares Animal Person: Stories, another exceptional work, described by the New York Times as “exquisite.” Moderated by Caroline Adderson.
Event Participants:
CAROLINE ADDERSON is an award-winning author of many books for young readers and adults. She has won the Sheila Egoff Award and the Chocolate Lily Book Award, among others. She teaches in the Writing and Publishing Program at SFU and is the Program Director of the Writing Studio at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
JONATHAN ESCOFFERY is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He is a PhD fellow in the University of Southern California’s PhD in Creative Writing and Literature Program. If I Survive You is his debut book. (UNITED STATES)
KIM FU is the author of For Today I Am a Boy, which won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and the Canadian Authors Emerging Writer Award. Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century was a NPR and Book Riot Best Book of 2022. (ALBERTA/ UNITED STATES)
ALEXANDER MACLEOD won an Atlantic Book Award for Light Lifting, which was also a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and the Commonwealth Book Prize. Animal Person includes stories published in The New Yorker, Granta, and the O. Henry Prize Stories. (NOVA SCOTIA)
