As part of the Studio Speaker Series, former York English professor, acclaimed writer, raconteur and provocateur Barry Callaghan will speak about his life as a literary journalist and read from newly published book Raise You Twenty: Essays and Encounters 1964 – 2011, Volume Three..
The reading will take place Wednesday, Sept. 21, from noon to 2pm, in the Paul Delaney Gallery, 320 Bethune College, Keele campus. Everyone is welcome to attend.
Considered one of Canada’s great journalists, Callaghan has received every major award in North America, including more than a dozen National Magazine Awards – seven of them gold – the inaugural W. O. Mitchell Award, the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters Award for Fiction, which he won twice, the Lowell Thomas Award and the Pushcart Prize. He also won Toronto’s One Hundred Outstanding Citizens Award.
Raise You Twenty (McArthur & Company), follows the critically acclaimed Raise You Five: Essays and Encounters 1964-2004, Volume One and Raise You Ten: Essays and Encounters 1964-2004, Volume Two. The series reflects on the significance of literature to the past and to the future and Callaghan prompts readers to think about the function of literature in the digital 
age. It includes extended essays on Saul Bellow, basketball player Vince Carter, the city of Munich and some of the great writers of the 20th century – Mavis Gallant and John Steinbeck.
Left: Barry Callaghan
Callaghan, who taught English at York for some 30 years, founded the literary quarterly, Exile, and imprint, Exile Editions, while he was a war correspondent in the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s. He is a novelist, poet and man of letters and his work has been much anthologized.
His works includes The Hogg Poems and Drawings (1978), The Black Queen Stories (1982), When Things Get Worst (1993), A Kiss is Still a Kiss (1995), Barrelhouse Kings: A Memoir (1998), Hogg: The Seven Last Words (2001), Between Trains (2007) and Beside Still Waters (2009).
The Studio Speaker Series is sponsored by York’s Creative Writing Program in the Department of English, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.