Joyce Carole Oates to accept lifetime achievement award

Irwin Block

April 2012

Montreal’s Blue Metropolis literary festival—the place to be if you want to discover and meet some of the finest local, national and international writers—keeps getting bigger and better.

American writer Joyce Carole Oates—who has published 50 novels since her debut in 1963 and an equal number of works in others genres—will accept the festival’s $10,000 prize for her lifetime achievement.

Oates will get the award and discuss her life and career with the CBC’s Eleanor Wachtel at the Grande Bibliothèque on Berri and de Maisonneuve downtown, April 21, 6:30 pm.

Earlier that day she will join an on-stage discussion about her crime novels with H.J. (Jack) Kirchoff, Globe & Mail deputy books editor. This is at 11:30 am at the OPUS Hotel, Salon St. Laurent, 10 Sherbrooke W.

The festival, now in its 14th year, runs April 18 to 23. Full details have yet to be made public.

The Blue Met Arab prize is to be awarded to Ahdaf Soueif, the Egyptian novelist who has achieved an international audience for her lyrical novels and commentaries in The Guardian.

She wrote The Map of Love and the recent published My City, Our Revolution, a reflection on the convulsive Arab Spring in Tahrir Square.

Italian writer Edouardo Nesi, winner of the 2011 Strega Prize for his novel Storia della mia gente (Story of My People), is another high-profile literary figure to speak at Blue Met.

His novel/essay examines the first generation of Italians who, as a result of globalization, are poorer than their parents.

The oft-neglected writing coming out of Cuba will include visits by crime writer and journalist Leonard Padura, novelist and poet Wendy Guerra, and exiled novelist Eduardo Manet, who lives in Paris.

The crime-writing genre will feature such accomplished locals as Trevor Ferguson and Chrystine Brouillet.