Join award-winning author Margaret Sweatman for an engaging conversation with Jeremy Gilmer and Margaret Anne Smith.
Nov. 18 at 7 p.m.
Hazen Hall Lecture Theatre.
Margaret Sweatman is a novelist, playwright, poet, and performer. Her work has won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the Margaret Laurence Book Award, the Carol Shields Winnipeg Award, and the McNally Robinson Book Award of the Year. Night Birds is her seventh novel.
In the novel, a catastrophe on a mountain in Transylvania sends toxic cyanide hurtling through rivers and streams, destroying an ecosystem and killing hundreds. As the impact of the mining breach stretches beyond the country’s borders, it ensnares Farrar and Clio, a couple living on another continent, who begin to understand that their business interests are intertwined with enterprises more sinister than they’d realized. Fearing the wrath of Peter Zugravi, a criminal with international reach, Farrar sends Clio and their daughter Sydney to a remote island where he hopes Zugravi will never find them. It’s here that Clio finally unlocks the family secrets and the mysterious origins of her family’s wealth. Intense, visceral, and agile, Night Birds is an all-absorbing thriller, whose morally complex characters are called upon to reckon with the power than runs beneath their feet and the consequences of their own complicity.
Jeremy Thomas Gilmer is a writer, traveler and consultant. Born in Canada he spent his first years in Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Spain, Switzerland and Jamaica before returning to Canada. His fiction focuses on the stories and spaces in between our present and future, creating characters and stories which echo the fragile world we live in and the shifting ground beneath our feet. His most recent non-fiction book, This Rare Earth: Building the Dams, Mines, and Megaprojects that Run Our World, is a graphic account of twenty-five years working for some of the largest mining and engineering companies in the world.
Margaret Anne Smith is an artist and educator from Saint John, NB. She is a poet, fiber artist, and educational developer, and teaches in the Department of Humanities and Languages at UNBSJ. Margaret Anne is fascinated by the interplay of colour and texture; she uses wet felting, dry (needle) felting, and hand-stitching to make garments, wall hangings, and small figures. In her writing and visual art, she draws inspiration from living near the shores of the Bay of Fundy.
As always, attendance is free and everyone is welcome.
