Festival

Vivek Shraya
Vivek Shraya is a Toronto-based artist whose body
of work includes several albums, films, and books,
which have been used as textbooks at several postsecondary
institutions. Her debut novel, She of the
Mountains, was named one of The Globe and Mail’s
Best Books of 2014. Vivek has read and performed
at shows, festivals and post-secondary institutions
internationally, sharing the stage with Tegan & Sara
and Dragonette, and has appeared at NXNE, Word
on the Street, and Yale University. Vivek is a threetime
Lambda Literary Award finalist, a 2015 Toronto
Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award finalist, and
a 2015 recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s
Dayne Ogilvie Prize Honour of Distinction. Vivek’s
first children’s picture book, The Boy & the Bindi, will
be published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2016. Her book
on recording artist M.I.A. will be published in 2017 by
ECW Press, as part of their Pop Classics series. Vivek
has been chosen to be the Grand Marshall for the
2016 Toronto Pride Parade
Merilyn Simonds
Merilyn Simonds is the author of 16 books, including
the novel The Holding, a New York Times Book Review
Editors’ Choice, and the Canadian creative nonfiction
classic, The Convict Lover, a Governor General’s Award
finalist and inspiration for the 2016 play by Judith
Thompson, Hot House. Her work is anthologized and
published internationally in eight countries. Her most
recent releases are a collection of personal essays, A
New Leaf, The Paradise Project, flash fiction published
in a hand-printed book arts edition, and “Where Do
You Think You Are?” in the Cambridge Companion to
Alice Munro, published in March 2016. In 2015, the
National Arts Centre Orchestra premiered Dear Life,
a symphony by Zosha di Castri based on Simonds’
adaptation of the Alice Munro story. Her forthcoming
book, in 2017, is Gutenberg’s Fingerprint: A Book Lover
Charts the Digital Divide.
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