What You Are
with M.G. Vassanji
Hosted by Peter Schneider
Podcast Fiction
Admission
Free
It is part of Vassanji's great talent to demonstrate that the minor changes -- unexpected love, sex, accusations -- in the life of a very modest man are, in fact, transformations of history.
Don’t miss this conversation between Peter Schneider, Manager and Executive Secretary of the Public Lending Right Program, and M.G. Vassanji, two-time Giller Prize winner and winner of the Governor General's Literary Award. Vassanji’s latest collection of short fiction, What You Are, explores the tensions between remembering past homes and belonging in new ones.
Weaving between wistful memories of youthful ambition and the compromises and comforts of age, travelling between the streets of Dar es Salaam and Toronto, the characters in these stories must negotiate distance--between here and there; between lives imagined and lives lived; between expectation and disappointment; between inclusion and exclusion.
Throughout, Vassanji engages passionately with the intellectual and political questions that inspire him as a writer and a citizen, while always matching the energy of his ideas with the empathy and emotional depth he invests in his characters. As with all Vassanji's finest work, What You Are stands as a model of artistic integrity and clarity of vision.
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