The Word on the Street, a national celebration of the written word, marks its 20th anniversary this year.
Featuring author readings, presentations and workshops, the Sept. 27 event takes place at Queen’s Park between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m.
Admission is free.
This year, the Word on the Street will be connected to book festivals in Kitchener, Vancouver and Halifax through video and LongPen technology.
Margaret Atwood will also launch her new novel, The Year of the Flood, at the festival.
Apart from Atwood, authors scheduled to attend Word on the Street include Nino Ricci, Camilla Gibb and Jane Urquhart.
Four Jewish writers – Cary Fagan, Charles Pachter, Adrienne Kress and Lauren Kirshner – will also read from their books.
A resident of Toronto, Fagan has written four novels and two collections of stories for both adults and children. His latest novel, Valentine’s Fall, is due to be published this month.
Fagan, whose work has also been published in the United States and Germany, has won the Toronto Book Award and the Jewish Committee Prize.
He will appear at the festival from noon to 12:30 at the children’s reading tent and from 1: 30 to 2 on the CBC Stage.
Pachter, one of Canada’s leading visual artists, has written M is for Moose, a children’s book that contains images from his portfolio of paintings.
In addition, he will read from Canada Counts, in which young readers can rhyme off their ABCs with illustrations of ducks, kayaks, moose and Lake Winnipeg.
Pachter will read from Canada Counts from 12:30 to 1:00 at the Children’s Reading Tent.
Kress, whose latest children’s book is Timothy and the Dragon’s Gate, is also an actress and stage director.
She graduated from the University of Toronto and studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts.
Her one-act play, A Weekend in the Country, was featured at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Toronto Summerworks Festival.
Kress will read from Timothy and the Dragon’s Gate from 2:30 to 3:00 at the Children’s Reading Tent.
Kirshner, who holds an MA in creative writing and English literature from the University of Toronto, is the author of Where We Have To Go, a novel of self-discovery and family set in the 1990s in Toronto.
Fresh from an appearance at the Winnipeg International Writers’ Festival, she has been invited to the International Festival of Authors in Toronto in October and the Toronto Jewish Book Fair in November.
She will read from Where We Have To Go from 5 to 5:30 at the Great Books Marquee.
