This has been sitting in my drafts folder for a couple of months… a profile of my favorite fiction mentor Steven Galloway by the CBC. The piece talks about The Cellist of Sarajevo and has a brief but interesting Q&A with Steven. A good length for whiling away a coffee break, I think.
Rock.
Last night was the Vancouver launch of Steven Galloway’s new book, The Cellist of Sarajevo. I’d like to thank Steven for inviting me to the event, which featured a reading, a massive book signing queue, an open bar, a live performance of Abinoni’s Adagio, an open bar, amazing food by the Blue Water Cafe, a cake in the shape of a cello, and an open bar. I got home at midnight and decided to read the first little bit of the novel. One hundred pages later, I forced myself to sleep. Recommended by litfarm.
I crack myself up. Anyway…
Local literary fixture and all-around friendly guy (he was decidedly cordial at the legion that one time I went) Kevin Chong profiles that other fixture and my mentor at SFU, Steven Galloway. Steven’s got a new book coming out, The Cellist of Sarajevo, which is getting a lot of attention in the press, and rightly so. I’ve heard the ending (dammit, Steve!) and can’t wait to read the rest.
Some more good news in the friends of litfarm department. Jennica Harper, a poet, instructor at Vancouver Film School and someone I harassed at a house warming party not long ago, was just named a winner in the Comic Creation Nation contest. It’s put on by zeros2heros.com, a social networking site built for writers, artists and fans of comics (and other genre entertainment).
This means that Jennica’s script Abigail’s War is going to get made into a graphic novel, and possibly more. Check out the other winners and the writer’s guidelines. Be warned that if you’re from part of North America that’s not Canada, you probably can’t enter, because they’re partnered with a government sponsored arts organization.
Just one of the ways Canada keeps the rest of North America under its thumb.
Way back at the end of 2007, the Vancouver Sun published some predictions on talented unknowns set to blow up in Aught Eight. (Notice how I imply that Aught Eight is some kind of trendy new way of referring to 2008, therefore firming up my hipster-cred. It could be, for all I know.) Anyway, on the list of people we need to keep an eye on, is my fellow alumna (TWS ’06) Gurjinder Basran:
A regional manager with Bell Mobility and a mother of two, north Delta’s Gurjinder Basran squeezed a creative writing program at Simon Fraser University into her life. There she wrote a novel about a young Indo-Canadian woman trying to assert her independence in a strict Punjabi Sikh community. She’s calling it Everything Was Goodbye.
Apart from Ranj Dhaliwal’s Daaku, not many novels have been written about the Indo-Canadian experience. Few books speak to “the first generation that grew up here,” says 35-year-old Basran, who is seeking an agent and a publisher. “I’m hoping it will resonate with all kinds of people.”
Not only that, but the novel is a semi-finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition, one of 100 entries out of 5,000 chosen by Penguin editors for the final read-through to narrow the field to ten books, which will then be chosen by Amazon readers… and presumably will be published by Penguin, although there’s no information about that on the Amazon site that I could find. Check out the excerpt of Everything Was Good-bye for as a free download from Amazon.
. I’d like to thank Steven for inviting me to the event, which featured a reading, a massive book signing queue, an open bar, a live performance of Abinoni’s Adagio, an open bar, amazing food by the Blue Water Cafe, a cake in the shape of a cello, and an open bar. I got home at midnight and decided to read the first little bit of the novel. One hundred pages later, I forced myself to sleep. Recommended by litfarm.