Fest ups grand prize purse, adds LGBTQ award
Literary festival marks milestone with new award, larger Grand Prix purse
The Blue Metropolis festival turns 20 this year, and the multilingual Montreal event that has carved its own niche in the international book-fest circuit is marking the milestone with some new wrinkles.
Philosopher Charles Taylor, a renaissance figure on the Canadian and international cultural landscape, has been named this year’s winner of the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix, a career-achievement honour won in past years by writers ranging from Margaret Atwood to Carlos Fuentes. To mark the anniversary, the prize’s purse has been doubled (possibly long-term, but certainly for this year) to $20,000.
The festival’s array of awards now includes the Prix Littéraire Violet, bestowed on a writer representing the LGBTQ community. The inaugural recipient is avantgarde novelist and poet Nicole Brossard, a giant of Quebec letters.
Other marquee names among the 260 authors in this year’s lineup are bestselling New Yorker staffer and Montreal native Adam Gopnik; Quebec crime novelist Louise Penny, who delivers the prefestival Hugh MacLennan Memorial Lecture at McGill University on April 19; novelist Lee Maracle, recipient of the First Peoples Literary Prize; Vikas Swarup, whose novel Q & A was the basis for the film Slumdog Millionaire; Montreal novelist Trevor Ferguson (a.k.a. John Farrow), whose 90-minute solo “literary performance” From Literary to Crime: Tales From a Writer’s Life promises to be a highlight; and Alina Dumitrescu, recipient of the Blue Metropolis/ Conseil des arts de Montréal Literary Diversity Prize, awarded to a first- or second-generation immigrant to Quebec.
The northern European and Scandinavian literary scene, long popular out of all proportion to the region’s relatively small population, gets its due with appearances by Icelandic crime writer Ragnar Jónasson, Swedish novelist Viveca Sten and Norwegian journalist Morten Strøksnes, among others.