Almost Live episode #148
It’s a formula that never fails: combine six acclaimed and award-winning authors with one band and a table of friends for a night of exceptional art and delight!
At the helm of the Vancouver Writers Festival flagship event is new Musical Director, Benjamin Millman: a pianist, producer and multi-instrumentalist hailing from Vancouver, whose mission is to pay homage to the great legacy of the Black American and African Diasporic Music he loves.
He’ll direct Benjamin Millman and the Oxymorons as they interpret readings from authors including Patrick deWitt (The Librarianist), Jenny Erpenbeck (Kairos), Elaine Feeney (How to Build a Boat), Paul Harding (This Other Eden), Kai Thomas (In the Upper Country), and Tania James (Loot).
We’re thrilled to present the recording of this live event from the 2023 Festival with returning special guest Sarah Wang, Programming Coordinator for the VWF.
Presented in partnership with Vancouver Writers Festival
This event will not be recorded for copyright reasons.
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Biographies
Patrick Dewitt is the author of the novels French Exit (an international bestseller and a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize), The Sisters Brothers (winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize), and the critically acclaimed Undermajordomo Minor and Ablutions. Born in British Columbia, he now resides in Portland, Oregon.
Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. New Directions publishes her books The Old Child & Other Stories, The End of Days, The Book of Words, and Visitation, which NPR called “a story of the century as seen by the objects we’ve known and lost along the way.” The End of Days won the prestigious Hans Fallada Prize and the International Foreign Fiction Prize. Erpenbeck lives in Berlin.
Elaine Feeney is an award-winning writer from Galway and teaches at The National University of Ireland, Galway. She has published three collections of poetry, including The Radio was Gospel and Rise and the award-winning drama, WRoNGHEADED with The Liz Roche Company. As You Were, her debut novel, was published in 2020 by Vintage in the UK and in 2021 by Biblioasis in North America. It was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and was included in The Guardian’s top debut novels for 2020. It appeared widely in best books of 2020 including in The Telegraph, The Irish Independent, The Evening Standard, The Guardian, The Observer and The Irish Times.
Paul Harding is an American author whose debut novel Tinkerswon the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction among other honours. He now teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook University and lives on Long Island, New York. This Other Eden is his third novel.
Tania James is the author of the novels The Tusk That Did the Damage and Atlas of Unknowns and the short story collection Aerogrammes. Her fiction has appeared in Boston Review, Granta, Guernica, One Story, A Public Space, and The Kenyon Review. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Benjamin Millman is a pianist, producer, and multi instrumentalist hailing from Vancouver. Specializing in a large range of genres and instruments, Benjamin’s performance credits are vast—you may have heard him leading Rnb, Funk, Pop or Jazz groups at countless Vancouver venues, or touring across Canada and the US.
Kai Thomas is a graduate of McGill University and the University of Guelph’s Creative Writing MFA. Apart from writing, he works as a carpenter and a land steward. He is Afro-Canadian, born and raised in Ottawa, descended from Trinidad and the British isles. In The Upper Country is his first novel and was a national bestseller.
Headshots of the authors. Top row, from left to right: Patrick Dewitt, Jenny Erpenbeck, Elaine Feeney. Bottom row: Paul Harding, Kai Thomas, Tania James. (courtesy Vancouver Writers Festival)
