Some of Canada’s best authors will be stopping by York University this year. They are part of the talented line-up for York’s highly popular Canadian Writers in Person series. The 2005-2006 season features a wealth of talent that spans the range of literary endeavours.
Headlining the series is Manitoba author Miriam Toews (right), recipient of the 2004 Governor General’s Award for Fiction – Canada’s most prestigious literary prize – for her novel A Complicated Kindness (Knopf Canada, 2004). The novel was also shortlisted for the 2004 Giller Prize.
Toews’ first novel, Summer of My Amazing Luck (1996) was nominated for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and won the John Hirsch Award. Published two years later, her second novel, A Boy of Good Breeding (1998), won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. She is also the author of Swing Low: A Life, a memoir of her father who committed suicide in 1998 after a lifelong struggle with manic depression. Swing Low won both the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction. Toews has written for the CBC, "This American Life" (on National Public Radio), Saturday Night, Geist, Canadian 
Geographic, Open Letters and The New York Times Magazine, and has won the National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Humour.
In addition to Toews, the series will feature five of Canada’'s leading novelists and poets – Nicole Brossard, Stephen Cain, Priscila Uppal, Shyam Selvadurail and York University Professor Caitlin Fisher of the Department of Film, Faculty of Fine Arts. Each will read from their work and will take questions from the audience.
The Canadian Writers in Person series of public readings at York, which is free and open to the public, is also part of an introductory course on Canadian literature. Visit the Canadian Writers in Person series Web site for more information on each of the authors.
The series is organized and sponsored by the following members of the York University community: Office of the Master, York’s Atkinson Faculty of Liberal & Professional Studies; Office of the Dean, Atkinson Faculty of Liberal & Professional Studies; School of Arts and Letters, Atkinson Faculty of Liberal & Professional Studies; Atkinson Student's Association; Atkinson Alumni Association; Office of the Vice-President (Academic); Office of the Associate Vice-President (Research); Office of the Dean, Faculty of Arts; Office of the Dean, Faculty of Graduate Studies; Graduate Program in English, Department of English, Faculty of Arts; Office of the Master, Stong College; Faculty of Education; Centre for Feminist Research; CHRY 105.5 FM; Office of the Master – Calumet, Founders, McLaughlin, Bethune, Vanier and Winters Colleges; and the Writer's Union of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts.