Belonging
with Danny Ramadan and Billy-Ray Belcourt
Hosted by Qu'ART's Glenn Nuotio
Danny Ramadan is a gifted, sensitive excavator of the things that break people and put them back together, the past as weight and lightness. In this novel he has created a world of immense sensory and emotional precision, at once true in its living details and yet electric with the presence of ghosts.
Join us for a conversation with two acclaimed writers on where home might be found and on the singular joys and sorrows of each journey towards connection, love and meaning.
Danny Ramadan returns with The Foghorn Echoes, a deeply moving novel about a forbidden love between two boys in war-torn Syria and the fallout that ripples through their adult lives. Syria, 2003. A blooming romance leads to a tragic accident when Hussam’s father catches him acting on his feelings for his best friend, Wassim. In an instant, the course of their lives is changed forever. Ten years later, the past continues to reverberate as Hussam and Wassim come face to face with heartache, history, drag queens, border guards, and ghosts both literal and figurative.
An unnamed narrator abandons his unfinished thesis and returns to northern Alberta. What ensues is a series of conversations, connections, and disconnections that reveal the texture of life. Populated by characters as alive and vast as the boreal forest, and culminating in a breathtaking crescendo, A Minor Chorus, the debut novel by Griffin Poetry Prize-winner Billy-Ray Belcourt is about how deeply entangled the sayable and unsayable can become—and about how ordinary life, when pressed, can produce hauntingly beautiful music.
PLEASE NOTE: For the safety and comfort of all patrons, masks are required to attend in person.
Most people coming by car park for free at the Supreme Court of Canada on Wellington St.
Ticket holders unable to attend in person can request access to the livestream. Livestream links will be sent about an hour prior and will remain active for 48 hours. Please email leslie@writersfestival.org to request a link.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
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