MONTREAL — Two major Israeli writers, A.B. Yehoshua and Meir Shalev, will be appearing at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival April 22 to 26.
It’s the first time Blue Metropolis has specifically highlighted Israeli writers in its 11-year history, although literary figures from the Jewish state have been in the lineup in the past, including Etgar Keret who graced the stage last year.
Yehoshua and Shalev will take part in a total of six events, in English and in French.
Yehoshua, born in Jerusalem in 1936, is the author of novels, short stories, plays and essays that have been published in 28 languages. His most acclaimed novel may be Mr. Mani, an exploration of Jewish identity and Israel through five conversations over a century and multiple generations. His most recent is Friendly Fire: A Duet, published in English last year.
He is currently a professor of literature at Haifa University.
Shalev, born in in 1948 in Nahalal, Israel, has written novels, children’s books and essays, which have been translated into more than 20 languages. He won Israel’s 2006 Brenner Prize for his novel A Pigeon and a Boy.
Both authors have strong political views: Yehoshua is a longtime activist in the Israeli peace movement, while Shalev is a columnist with the newspaper Yediot Ahronot, in which he comments satirically on government policy and Israeli society.
At least two other Jewish writers of note are also coming to Blue Metropolis: novelist and human-rights activist Marek Halter of France, who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto as a child, and American Daniel Mendelsohn, whose 2006 non-fiction work The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, an enquiry into the fate of family members who perished in the Holocaust, was praised by critics as diverse as Oprah Winfrey and Elie Wiesel.
Among the local writers on themes related to the Jewish experience who will speak are Ami Sands Brodoff, Bill Brownstein, Ann Charney, Elaine Kalman Naves and Monique Polak.
The late Mordecai Richler will be remembered during the festival’s closing event celebrating Montrealers profiled in publisher Penguin’s new Extraordinary Canadians Series. Well-known Canadian writers were asked to produce short biographies of subjects with whom they might not naturally be linked. The story on Richler is written by novelist M.G. Vassanji, twice the winner of the Giller Prize.
Blue Metropolis is teaming up with the Jewish Public Library in its off-site educational programming for students.
Polak and author Raquel Rivera will speak to elementary schoolchildren at the JPL’s Norman Berman Children’s Library April 22 and 23, respectively.
The 11th annual edition of Blue Metropolis takes place at the Delta Centre-Ville Hotel. More than 250 writers, publishers, translators and others connected to books from 15 countries will take part in the program. For information, call 937-BLEU.