Author and English Professor Y-Dang Troeung and her family were among the last of the 60,000 refugees from Cambodia that then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to relocate to Canada. Forty years later, in her brilliant book Landbridge, Y-Dang returns to this moment, and to many others before and after, to explore the tension between that public narrative of happy “arrival,” and the multiple, often hidden truths of what happened to the people in her family. Y-Dang passed away in 2022 after completing this exceptional work. Four revered writers, friends, and colleagues of the author and academic celebrate her work and share more about her life. Join Dionne Brand, David Chariandy, Madeleine Thien, and Christopher B. Patterson for an immersive tribute to this writer and an introduction to a new classic that demands to be read. Moderated by Doretta Lau.
Presented thanks to the support of Penguin Random House.
Event Participants:
DIONNE BRAND is a poet, novelist, and essayist. Her books include Nomenclature, her new and collected poems, What we All Long For, and Theory. She has won the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize, among others. Brand is the Editorial Director of Alchemy.
DAVID CHARIANDY is a writer and professor of literature at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of the novels Soucouyant and Brother. David’s books have won the Roger’s Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the City of Toronto Book Prize, the Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction, and more.
DORETTA LAU started watching horror movies at age nine and sketch comedy at eleven. She is the author of the short story collection How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? and a forthcoming novel about a dysfunctional workplace struggling to open a theme park that celebrates death.
CHRIS PATTERSON is an Associate Professor of Social Justice at The University of British Columbia, and an award-winning author of two academic books, two novels, and a prose-poetry work, Nimrods. He writes creatively under his matrilineal name, KAWIKA GUILLERMO.
MADELEINE THIEN is the author of four books, most recently Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which won the Giller Prize and Governor General's Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.
