Media Release
For immediate
release
July 5, 2006
Top non-fiction writers present a month of engaging conversations at The Banff Centre
Literary Journalism Conversations, Mondays, 8 p.m.
July 10: John Vaillant
July 17: Nelofer Pazira
July 24: Rosemary Sullivan and Juan Opitz
July 31: Elena Poniatowska
Rolston Recital Hall, The Banff Centre, Donation at the door
Information: 403.762.6301 | 800.413.8368
Presented as part of the 2006 Banff Summer Arts Festival
Nelofer Pazira’s journey through fact and fiction has taken a few unexpected turns. Born and raised in Afghanistan, Pazira’s life story became the basis for the feature film Kandahar, which she starred in. Pazira then adapted her own story into memoir with her best-selling first book A Bed of Red Flowers. Now she brings the chronicle of both stories, the interlacing strands of history, politics, and personal memoir, cinema and literature, fiction and nonfiction, to the Banff Summer Arts Festival – Pazira is one of the featured writers who will present as part of The Banff Centre’s popular Literary Journalism Conversations series.
Directed by acclaimed writer Rosemary Sullivan, the series kicks off on July 10 with a presentation by John Vaillant, who won the Governor General’s Award in 2005 for his book The Golden Spruce. It’s the story of Grant Hadwin, a logger and forestry expert whose increasing agitation about the environmental effects of logging in northern B.C. led him to cut down a rare spruce tree in the Queen Charlotte Islands, a tree that had a deep spiritual significance to the Haida and to most residents of the islands. Vaillant has written for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, and Men’s Journal.
On July 17, Pazira will present a talk called “Trans(form)ation: the intersection of personal and political stories from print to the big screen.” She’ll discuss the integration of personal storytelling with larger political and social themes. On July 24, Sullivan will present a further take on her work in progress, Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in France, which traces the stories of a remarkable group of artists – including Andre Gide, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and Henri Matisse - who gathered in a house in the south of France waiting for passage out of the country. Juan Opitz, in collaboration with Rosemary Sullivan, will present his short film The Road Out: El Camino al Olvido, which is based on Sullivan’s book.
Chair of the Literary Journalism program at the Centre, Sullivan is an acclaimed poet and winner of the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction for Shadow Maker, her biography of Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwan. She has written ten books, including biographies of Margaret Atwood and Elizabeth Smart, and every summer invites three other top non-fiction writers to Banff to mentor young cultural writers and participate in the Conversations series of public talks.
The final presentation, on July 31, will feature Elena Poniatowska Amor, founder of Mexico’s first feminist magazine, Fem, and the newspaper, La Jornada. A journalist, biographer, translator, and professor, Amor was the first woman to win Mexico’s National Award for Journalism. She is the author of books including an acclaimed chronicle on the life of Italian photographer and revolutionary Tina Modotti, and Massacre in Mexico, about the massacre of 325 unarmed students protesting police repression a week before the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
For more information on Literary Journalism Conversations:
http://www.banffcentre.ca/bsaf/2006/readings/
For more information on the 2006 Banff Summer Arts Festival:
http://www.banffcentre.ca/bsaf/2006/
Media Contact
Jill Sawyer
Media and Communications Officer, The Banff Centre
403.762.6475