Prose in the Park Festival Returns June 10

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The Third Annual Prose open-air Literary Festival will take please this weekend in Parkdale Park. The event will be free so that everyone has the opportunity to meet emerging authors across Canada. This year, Prose in the Park will have Francophones, Anglophones and Spanish-speaking authors. Seventeen publishers and more than eighty independent writers will be selling and signing books in the book fair of the festival.

The festival allows you to take part in some of its four panels in English, three panels in French, and one panel in Spanish. In the first case, the English panel will be composed for:

 (a) “Reaching Thirteen (literary fiction) with moderator Ursula Pflug and panelists Neil Smith (Hugh MacLennan Prize 2015), Catherine Leroux (Giller Prize Finalist 2016), Nadia Bozak (author and head of Creative Writing at Carleton University) and Paul Carlucci (Danuta Gleed Winner 2013),”

(b) “The Musicality of Fiction (literary fiction) with moderator Menaka Raman-Wilms and panelists Sean Michaels (Giller Prize Winner 2014), Susan Doherty Hannaford (2016 Grace Irwin Prize winner) and Robert Barclay (author and international expert in the conservation and preservation of musical instruments),”

(c) “Emerging Crime (crime fiction) with moderator Melissa Yi and panelists Michael Blair (author and past President of the Crime Writers of Canada), Catherine Alstolfo (2012 Derrick Murdoch Award Winner), Jim Napier (author and crime fiction reviewer at the Ottawa Review of Books) and Patricia Filteau (author and Vice-President, Capital Crime Writers),” and

(d) “Poetry at 150 (poetry) with moderator Michael Mirolla and panelists Sarah Tsiang (2012 Gerald Lampert Prize Winner), Michael Fraser (2016 CBC Poetry Prize winner), Kelly Norah Drukker (2016 A.M. Klein Poetry Prize winner) and Bänoo Zan (2017 Gerald Lampert Prize finalist).”

For the second group of panelists in French, the Park Literary Festival will has the participation of:

(a) “Le pouvoir de l'auteur dans la traduction moderated by Mélanie Rivet with Louis L'Allier (Nikolaos, le copiste), Catherine Leroux (Prix littéraire France-Québec 2014), Madeleine Stratford (Prix de la traduction littéraire John Glassco 2013) and Caroline Vu (Fred Kerner Award 2016),”

(b) “L'espace est-il un personnage ? moderated by Éric Charlebois with Stéphanie Corriveau (La Grande Illusion), Éric Mathieu (Prix littéraire Émergence AAOF 2017), Gabriel Osson (Hubert, le restavèk) and Michèle Vinet (Prix littéraire Le Droit, 2017; Prix Émile-Ollivier 2012; Prix littéraire Trillium 2012),”

(c) “L'Histoire dans le roman est-elle une mise en contexte sociale ou plutôt un catalyseur narratif ? moderated by Éric Charlebois with Liliane Gratton (La décennie de nos jeunes années), Kalula Kalambay (Tendre Afrique), Véronique Marie Kaye (Prix Trillium 2016) and Marie-Josée Martin (Prix littéraire Émergence AAOF 2014; Prix Le Droit 2014; Prix Christine-Dumitriu-Van-Saanen 2013; Prix du livre d’Ottawa 2013),”

For those Spanish-speakers, there will be a panel in which will be discussing:

(a) El arte de vivir en la encrucijada (The Art of Living in the Crossroads), moderated by Ramón Sepúlveda with Luis Molina (Las falsas mujeres de Gaugin), Camila Reimer (Tiempo de ser) and Jocy Medina (Habana dura).

Note that, the opening of the Third Annual Prose open-air Literary Festival, scheduled at 11:00 a.m., will be in charge of five Ottawa storytellers. However, the official opening will be at noon within the framework of a bilingual ceremony with the Mayor of Ottawa, Jim Watson, and bagpipe music.

Terry Fallis, twice winner of the Leacock Medal, has joined Prose in the Park, and M.C. Sang Kim will do a thirty-minute interview with readings with Canada's most celebrated humour writer since Stephen Leacock. All this at 12:30 p.m. on Stage 2.

At 2:00 p.m. the five finalists of the Frank Hegyi Award for Emerging Authors will be reading some passages, which will be commented by the jurors on the short-listed books. At 2:40 p.m., the winner of the award will be announced.

For more information visit Prose in the Park