Michael Ondaatje, Ian Williams, Brandi Morin featured at 2024 Toronto International Festival of Authors
The festival will run from Sept. 19-29 featuring over 100 authors and artists from 11 countries
The Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) returns this fall with a line-up featuring names like Ian Williams, Brandi Morin and Michael Ondaatje.
TIFA celebrates authors, readers and the arts through a series of readings, panels, exhibits and performances. This year the festival is centred on the theme of "writing home." It features stories, conversations and ideas around place and culture as well as what home can mean to different people.
The Canadian presence includes Ondaatje, literary legend and author of The English Patient. Starting his writing career with poetry, he won two Governor General's Awards before trying his hand at fiction. Since then, he has won many awards including the Governor General's Literary Award, the Giller Prize and the CBC Short Story Prize.
Ondaatje was the first ever Canadian to win the Man Booker Prize in 1992. His most recent book A Year of Last Things, his highly anticipated return to poetry, explores his life through themes of displacement, love, grief and discovery.
Morin, a Cree, Iroquois and French writer and journalist from Treaty 6 Territory in Alberta, will be featured in TIFA's Festival of Indigenous Stories. She won the 2024 Freedom to Read Award which celebrates work championing freedom of expression. Her work has been featured in publications including The New York Times, Al Jazeera and CBC and she was recently a reader for the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize.
Morin's memoir Our Voice of Fire explores her journey through foster care, abuse and her career to discover her purpose in journalism.
CBC's 2024 Massey Lecturer Ian Williams will join the director of TIFA to discuss connection and community in the digital age. Williams is a writer and poet whose works include 2019 Giller Prize winning Reproduction, poetry collection Personals and Disorientation: Being Black in the World which was shortlisted for the 2021 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
Other Canadian writers at TIFA include Jackie Lau, the author of romance novel Love, Lies and Cherry Pie. The book explores family pressure, love and life in Toronto through the eyes of Emily Hung, the last single daughter in her family. Lau will join Lily Chu, the author of workplace romance book The Takedown, on a panel discussing writing romantic comedies and strong Asian female characters.
Senator Murray Sinclair will feature at the Festival of Indigenous Stories discussing his personal experiences, justice and his upcoming memoir Who We Are.
Sinclair is a former activist, judge, senator, co-chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry and the chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Who We Are charts his life story through his own oral history that centres Indigenous ways of storytelling.
Also on the TIFA line up are other Canadian writers including Mason Coile, author of the horror novel William, and CBC's Quirks and Quarks host Bob McDonald, author of memoir Just Say Yes.
International authors at this year's TIFA include Big Little Lies author Liane Moriarty, historical war writer Ben Macintyre and Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari. TIFA will also feature the multilingual program The World In Other Words highlighting Arabic voices this year.
TIFA runs from Sept. 19-29. Tickets can be purchased on the website starting on Aug. 15.
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