The Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival celebrates its 25the big anniversary this year, with around a hundred guest writers, including Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay, Michel Marc Bouchard, Sylvain Tesson, Mathieu Lindon, Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood.
From April 27 to 30, the festival will take place at Hotel 10, in downtown Montreal, on the theme of the future. The discussions and interviews will therefore revolve around questions evoking the future of the planet, democracy, identities, languages and peoples, as well as our imaginations. The exchanges will be held not only in French and English, but also in Spanish, with echoes in the Ojibwe, Gaelic, Catalan or Innu languages.
Foreign guests include Palestinian journalist and animator Rami Younis, Italian novelist Paolo Cognetti and his colleague Andrea Marcolongo (author of the book Etymologies for surviving chaos), the Israelis Yaël Neeman and Maya Savir, the French writer Santiago H. Amigorena, the Franco-American economist Esther Duflo and the Spanish novelist Jorge Carrión, author of the novel Those of the future.
Margaret Atwood will give a special one-hour interview before the official launch of the festival, April 17 at Saint-James United Church, Sainte-Catherine Street West.
She will take the opportunity to discuss her work and her vision of literature around her very recent collection of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood.
An evening tribute to the Canadian writer of Iranian origin Naïm Kattan, who died in 2021, is also on the program.
The online edition of the festival will be launched on April 12 and will offer short interviews on its site with writers who will then participate in indoor activities. Virtual thematic interviews on current issues are also planned – among others with the Innu poet Joséphine Bacon –, while the South Americans Gioconda Belli and Claudia Piñeiro will discuss their side of feminist commitment, among many others. round tables.