14 Dystopian Dreams
Host: Claudia Casper
Tuesday, October 18, 2016 – 8:30pm
Waterfront Theatre
There seems to be no end to the variations of worlds-gone-wrong that we can dream up. Michael Helm imagines a neuroscientist who intends to blow the whistle on a pharmaceutical company and its creativity drug gone wrong. In Anna Smaill’s dystopian world, chimes are played across London morning and night to mute memory and keep people trapped in ignorance. M.G. Vassanji veers from themes he often tackles to imagine a future where mortality has been overcome but people are running out of memory space and, by erasing memories, create new identities. In Charlotte Wood’s near-future nightmare world, misogyny and totalitarianism haunt and hunt 10 young women. Come meet four explorers who have been to the darkest parts of our psyche, and returned with great fiction.
47 Out of Africa
Host: Denise Ryan
Thursday, October 20, 2016 – 6:00pm to 7:15pm
Studio 1398
M.G. Vassanji was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania. Although he left Africa as a young man, his writing career has focused on the experiences of East African Indians, migration and diaspora. His memoir recounts his return to his homeland and the memories it evokes. Alain Mabanckou, born in the Republic of the Congo, left for France when he was 22. His memoir tells of his return “home” after 23 years, his guilt as a relative asks for his shoes and shirt, and his regret that he’s a stranger. In an age of mass migration, where millions have left their homelands yet continue to be shaped by what they left behind, these two contemplative authors reflect on living as exiles and question what home really means.
M.G. Vassanji is the author of six novels, two collections of short stories and two works of non-fiction. He has twice won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, as well as the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the Commonwealth Prize. Vassanji grew up in Kenya and Tanzania, and received a BSc from MIT and a PhD in Nuclear Physics from the University of Pennsylvania before moving to Canada. In 2005, he was made a member of the Order of Canada. His latest work is Nostalgia, a novel about a future where eternal life is possible and identities can be chosen.
mgvassanji.com
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