LitFest Presents: Kim Echlin

From the internationally bestselling author of The Disappeared comes a profound meditation on the cultural impact of storytelling and testimony in five intimate and illuminating essays.

In this moving collection, critically acclaimed novelist Kim Echlin examines how we turn to literature to measure our lives against the darknesses of our time. Tell Others explores how literature resists silencing and repression with truth and imagination.

Echlin skillfully blends her lived experience in different parts of the world—teaching in post-revolutionary China, researching war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, studying under one of Canada’s most respected Elders, Basil H. Johnston—with wide-ranging reading that offers solace and highlights the possibility to transform outrage into understanding and resistance.

Looking to her favourite writers—Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Ma Jian, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Haruki Murakami, to name a few—Echlin grapples in fresh ways with tyranny, war, sexual violence, and censorship to bear witness to the past and look to the future. Written in characteristically unsparing and evocative prose, Tell Others is an invitation to all readers to acknowledge histories that are difficult to see and to make meaning from the stories that buried bones tell.

KIM ECHLIN is the award-winning author of Elephant Winter, Dagmar’s Daughter, Under the Visible Life, and Speak, Silence, winner of the Toronto Book Award. Her novel The Disappeared won the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award and is published in 20 countries. She serves on the board of PEN International.

RAYANNE HAINES is a producer, podcaster, educator and award-winning poet. Her third collection, Tell The Birds Your Body Is Not A Gun (Frontenac House 2021), won the 2022 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for both the BPAA Robert Kroetsch Award and the ReLit Award. Her poetic memoir, What Kind of Daughter? (Frontenac House 2024), was shortlisted for the 2024 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. Rayanne hosts the Crow Reads podcast, is the President of the League of Canadian Poets, and an Assistant Professor at MacEwan University. She teaches and writes with vulnerability as a guiding force.

Please note: This event utilizes tiered pricing in an effort to reduce barriers to attendance

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