The Bibliophile: Gone a wee bit mad

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It’s a striking little book. Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet. By striking I mean it is both very beautiful and violent and grotesque. It’s also funnier than you’d expect. Benbecula comes out in North America next week and it may be the book I’m most excited about. A story of madness and uncertainty told with a Samuel Beckett-esque voice, the novel is based on a true, little-known triple murder that took place on a remote Scottish island in the 1850s. It’s written from the perspective of the murderer’s brother, who describes what led to his brother’s actions, and as he tells us what’s happened, we start to question whether his brother was the only insane one.

Photo: Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet. Cover designed by Kate Sinclair.

Burnet first learned of the case when he was doing research for his internationally celebrated and Booker-shortlisted novel His Bloody Project. In some ways Benbecula is the inverse of that book—where His Bloody Project was about a fictional murder presented as fact, Benbecula takes a real murder and builds a fiction around it. And like all of Burnet’s work, it keeps you guessing on what’s true and what’s not.

Benbecula was the first of Burnet’s books that I’ve read, but after doing so I quickly sought out his others. And I know this post is to let you know about Benbecula in the hope that you will read it, but I would also like to shout out his 2022 novel Case Study, because I recently read it and can’t stop thinking about it. Just as I can’t stop thinking about Benbecula. This is fiction that genuinely makes me giddy to read. I don’t know if it’s the existentialist bent to his work that appeals to me as someone who read too much Beckett and Camus in university, or his dark humour, or the vividness of his language. It’s probably all of that, but I’ll stop gushing now.

For every book we publish, we put together a press kit for the media that we send along with advance copies of the book. Some of you are no doubt already familiar with this. The kit includes a description of the book, a biography of the author, and all the lovely things critics and booksellers have said about it. We also include a short interview with the author, usually conducted by me or Dominique, which we then like to post on Substack. I’ve been at Biblioasis exactly one year as of this past Tuesday, and doing these interviews is one of my favourite parts of the job. I really enjoyed my conversation with Burnet, and hope you do too.

Ahmed Abdalla,
Publicist

A Biblioasis Interview with Graeme Macrae Burnet

You’ve said that you first heard of the MacPhees’ story when you were writing His Bloody Project around twelve years ago. Why did you decide to return to it now? What about it made it stick in your mind all this time?

I was doing that research for His Bloody Project years ago and I came across the case of Angus MacPhee who killed three members of his family on this tiny Scottish island. It was of interest to me at the time because I was writing about a fictional nineteenth-century murder case in a Scottish Highland community, and here was one that actually happened, and that Angus was found to be criminally insane and so was not hanged was also interesting. At the time, it was tangential to what I was doing, but it stuck in my mind, not only because it was remarkable in itself, but because there was a French case, which actually inspired His Bloody Project, about a peasant called Pierre Riviere who killed three members of his own family. And Angus MacPhee killed three members of his own family. It just seemed so remarkable to come across cases that were so similar in some ways.

I returned to it because I was approached by a publisher here in Scotland who were doing a series of books based on real incidents in Scottish history and they asked me if I had any ideas. Once they said yes to this, I went back and really properly researched the case in the archives in Scotland and got down to the nitty gritty of it.

How extensive was that research?

We have the National Records Office in Scotland, which contains all the documents relating to criminal cases going back to the 1800s. At that time, 1857, records of trials weren’t kept routinely, but what was in the archive were the “precognition statements.” These are basically witness statements that you would give to the police, and it’s what the witness would say at the trial. There were about 130 pages of those handwritten, completely original documents that I’m not sure anybody’s read before. I certainly haven’t seen references to them. Those 130 pages of precognition statements were the foundation of the book. Then there were also the legal documents, letters between lawyers and so on which were of less interest to me. It took me about a week or two to read through that material properly. It’s quite time consuming because it’s all handwritten. And I did other little bits of research into the historical side of what life was like in Benbecula at the time.

Photos: Archival materials from the National Records Office in Scotland. Photos courtesy of Graeme Macrae Burnet.

I think I heard you once say that you found archival material “evocating and inspiring.” What about it appeals to you and how does it inspire?

Partly it’s the physical documents. They come bundled up, tied with ribbon. Immediately you feel like you’re entering a secret world. And there’s the old vellum smell of the documents, and the handwriting, which changes depending on the author. They’re very evocative in that way. They almost transport you to the point when these documents were being created. It’s not like a print out of a Word document, which is just completely anonymous.

But it’s also the material that’s contained in these documents and the insight into the life of the characters that I was writing about. Little details like a young girl feeling that this character is following her along the path. Somehow you get surprising insights through reading these documents. I think any novelist would find that kind of material sort of inspiring and feel that it’s a starting point for a story.

And how much of it is real vs. fictional? It almost feels like true crime, assembling the basic plot from these real documents and the real case, but this is fiction which gives you the freedom to change the story.

That was the challenge for me because I was commissioned to write a fictional book and in some ways you could easily have written a nonfiction book about this case and the ramifications of the case. So very early in the writing, I decided to tell the story from the point of view of the murderer’s brother, Malcolm, and with that there’s two strands to the narrative. There’s the strand in which Malcolm describes the events leading up to his brother Angus’ murders and then there’s the strand in which Malcolm describes his current life in Benbecula. All the events in the past tense about Angus are based on the documents I read. All the present tense of Malcolm’s life is completely fictional. So it’s about 50/50.

Writing from Malcolm’s point of view was an interesting choice. To me, it gave the book a certain level of intimacy, a kind of disquieting intimacy as you realize he’s starting to go mad himself. And it also feels like a confession.

The decision to use Malcolm as the narrator was completely instinctive. The book had to be written quickly. I made that decision when I was in Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow. I sat there and wrote about five hundred words of what is now the opening. Of course as soon as you decide on your mode of narration, it imposes limitations on what you can write, but I stuck with it. Very quickly I realized that what I’m writing about is a man alone in an isolated cottage with his dark memories and he’s quite tormented in a disquieting way, as you would say.

Years ago when I was student, I was a massive aficionado of Samuel Beckett, particularly his trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable). I hadn’t read those books for thirty years, although they had a massive impact on me when I read them. I went back and listened to them as an audio book. There’s a brilliant reading by an actor called Sean Barrett which actually makes it more accessible because they’re quite avant-garde books. But I went back to Beckett because Beckett is writing about this increasingly disembodied voice, a person alone with his memories and you’re not sure what’s true and not true. I kind of drew on that Beckettian vibe.

I always found Beckett rather funny as well. I also think there’s a similar humour in Benbecula too.

I think it’s a very dark piece but the more times I went over it during the editorial process, weirdly I began to find it funnier and funnier, which probably says more about me than the book. A lot of it is quite grotesque, a really dark sort of humour. And it’s probably not very funny at all. I think I might have gone a wee bit mad writing the book.

Malcolm makes very rude remarks about his neighbors’ children or whatever, there’s a kind of humour there, but there’s also a sort of humour, and I don’t know if it’s even humour, but when something very violent or dramatic or unpleasant has happened, a paragraph will end with a nondescript observation or sentiment or an understatement. To me there’s a kind of humour in that which I think is quite Scottish.

You mentioned the Beckett influence, and it seems a lot of your work has a kind of existentialist bent to it. But were there any other influences on Benbecula?

Influence is a funny thing because you’re not always conscious of it. Somebody else might discern it or ascribe influence when you’ve never read that other text. But you’re right, I’m a dyed in the wool existentialist and I’m always concerned about questions of free will and agency and things like that. But I wasn’t thinking about that stuff when I was writing this book.

The only other thing I returned to mentally was Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which I also reread when writing the book. There’s a couple of quite meaty illusions to Jekyll and Hyde. The reason I went back to that text is because to me I was trying to create layers of textures in the book. As I was writing, I was thinking about the relationship between Malcolm and Angus. Angus is the “id” in Freudian terms. He’s unbridled, unfiltered, lust and instinct. He has drives and just follows them. Malcolm is the more sensible, normal brother. But it’s the relationship between the two which becomes closer. Malcolm becomes less “civilized” to use another Freudian term. (I’m not a Freudian by the way). But yes, there’s a bit of a Stevenson influence.

In the afterword, you talk about the “maniac” label and how, for some people, it’s used as a way of writing them off or dismissing an attempt to understand. Do you see Benbecula as a way of understanding that madness? By comparing Angus and Malcolm, the reader gets to see someone outwardly mad and one that’s more internal.

Malcolm’s mental universe does not really allow him to question or try things in the way that we do now in the twenty-first century. We have a different vocabulary and frameworks of thinking about madness. I don’t think Malcolm is trying to understand Angus. He almost just accepts what Angus did. But of course, it’s for the reader to speculate about why Angus may have committed the acts he did. Even in the afterword, I didn’t really want to get into too much speculation about why Angus did it because it would be no more than that, speculation. But also because I like the reader to do some work. I don’t want to say here is my interpretation of what happened 150 years ago, because people tend to see the author’s view as authoritative and that closes down the relationship with the material. And we still use words like maniac to divert ourselves from trying to understand why a person has committed an act of violence.

I really enjoyed the afterword. Part of me wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be nonfiction or fictional.

I’ve always wanted to write a nonfiction book and I love dealing with the research, so the afterword is nonfiction. But that’s interesting to me because when I wrote His Bloody Project, that was a fictional case written in a documentary style. So many readers thought it was based on a true case or that all the documents were real. Whereas Benbecula is the exact mirror image. It’s a real case written in a fictional style. All my work has some device in which I’m the translator not the author of the novel or something like that, so I’ll be very curious to know if readers are like “Yeah, right, he’s pulling our leg again.”

Photo: On the island of Benbecula, Scotland.

Was it more challenging to take a real case and write it into a novel or was it easier the other way around?

It was in a way more difficult because with the real life aspects of this book, I felt tied to the actual events. And so I’m describing certain things that actually happened or at least describing the version that I have access to, but of course I have to fictionalize them to the extent that I invent dialogue and conflate characters, but there’s a restriction in that. Whereas with the wholly fictional parts, I immediately felt much more free in the writing of it. We are inside Malcolm’s head and I wanted in a way to create the feeling that these thoughts are tumbling out of his head. The two parts were quite different to write simply because the Angus bits are really anchored in the facts of the case.

Did you actually travel to Benbecula as well as part of your research? What was that like?

Yeah, I went there in late January or early February and it was in the middle of a really bad storm. You have to take a ferry there. My first trip was canceled because the ferry didn’t run. Then I rebooked for the following week. The storm was coming but I knew I would get there, but I didn’t know if I would get off. So I spent a lot of the time there just looking at the travel app to see if the ferry was leaving. But it was really important for me to get there because in a sort of vaguely ethical way, I would have felt it was wrong to write about a place that I’d never set foot in. But also in terms of imagining the book, it was absolutely crucial that I went and stood where that house was and saw the landscape. I could now see the small universe of the book.

I also had a copy of this hand-drawn map of the murder scene that I got from the archive, which is all wet now. And the reason that it’s all wet is because I took it with me just before the storm. It was really windy and I was in this completely desolate stretch of land. It’s not beautiful at all. And I’m going around and there’s two settlements on this map and there were two sets of ruins on this piece of land. I also had another map from 1851, which we called ordinance survey maps, that marked all the settlements. So I could kind of match up the hand-drawn map with the other map. I can’t be 100 percent sure, but I feel quite confident I found the ruins of the house. I think that sort of thing is quite cool. But I don’t think it’ll start a birth of tourism for Benbecula.

Is there anything you want people to take away from reading this book?

I want them to feel immersed in the world of the book. I felt, and this is going back a bit to Beckett, that if you’re writing in a shorter form it offers the opportunity to be slightly more experimental. I just really wanted to get inside the head of this guy who lived in this landscape. So I would like people to feel immersed in this book, and they can make whatever they want of it, but I want them to feel it’s vivid and have a kind of visceral feeling on reading it.

Almost like they’re going mad themselves?

Hopefully.

In good publicity news:

BALDWIN, STYRON, AND ME longlisted for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

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We’re thrilled to share that this morning, on Thursday, October 23, the longlist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction was announced, and included Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen, translated by Catherine Khordoc. The full longlist can be viewed here.

The shortlist will be announced on November 18, and the two medal winners will be announced on January 27, 2026.

The Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, established in 2012, recognize the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published in the US in the previous year and serve as a guide to help adults select quality reading material. They are the first single-book awards for adult books given by the American Library Association and reflect the expert judgment and insight of library professionals who work closely with adult readers. The winning authors (one for fiction, one for nonfiction) receive a $5,000 cash award.

Grab a copy of Baldwin, Styron, and Me here!

ABOUT BALDWIN, STYRON, AND ME

Longlisted for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • Finalist for the 2025 Governor General’s Literary Award in Translation • Finalist for the 2025 John Glassco Translation Prize

In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron’s guest house. The two wrote during the day, then spent evenings confiding in each other and talking about race in America. During one of those conversations, Baldwin is said to have convinced his friend to write, in first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and also creating outrage in part of the African American community.

Decades later, the controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonates. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers the writers’ surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman torn by the often unidimensional versions of her identity put forth by today’s politics and media. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and the often contentious public debates about these topics, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen—even in disagreement.

ABOUT MELIKAH ABDELMOUMEN

Mélikah Abdelmoumen was born in Chicoutimi in 1972. She lived in Lyon, France, from 2005 to 2017. She holds a PhD in literary studies from the Université de Montréal and has published many articles, short stories, novels, and essays, including Les désastrées (2013), Douze ans en France (2018), and Petite-Ville (2024). She worked as an editor with the Groupe Ville-Marie Littérature in Montreal until 2021. She was the editor-in-chief of Lettres québécoises, a Québec literary magazine, from 2021 to 2024. Baldwin, Styron, and Me is her tenth book (and the first to be translated).

ABOUT CATHERINE KHORDOC

Catherine Khordoc is a professor of French and Canadian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is the author of Tours et détours: Le mythe de Babel dans la littérature contemporaine (University of Ottawa Press, 2012). She also considers herself in many ways a frontier-dweller.

2025 Governor General’s Literary Award Finalists: BALDWIN, STYRON, AND ME and MAY OUR JOY ENDURE

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We’re excited to share that this morning on Tuesday, October 21, two Biblioasis books were announced as finalists for the 2025 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation: Catherine Khordoc’s translation of Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen and Donald Winkler’s translation of May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert!

View the full finalists announcement on the GG Books website here.

The Canada Council for the Arts funds, administers and actively promotes the Governor General’s Literary Awards (GGBooks) which celebrate literature and inspire people to read books by creators from Canada. The award provides finalists and winners with valuable recognition from peers and readers across the country. The monetary award for finalists is $1,000, and $25,000 for each winning book.

The winners of each category will be announced on Thursday, November 6.

About BALDWIN, STYRON, AND ME

Finalist for the 2025 Governor General’s Literary Award in Translation • Finalist for the 2025 John Glassco Translation Prize

In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron’s guest house. The two wrote during the day, then spent evenings confiding in each other and talking about race in America. During one of those conversations, Baldwin is said to have convinced his friend to write, in first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and also creating outrage in part of the African American community.

Decades later, the controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonates. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers the writers’ surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman torn by the often unidimensional versions of her identity put forth by today’s politics and media. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and the often contentious public debates about these topics, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen—even in disagreement.

Catherine Khordoc is a professor of French and Canadian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is the author of Tours et détours: Le mythe de Babel dans la littérature contemporaine (University of Ottawa Press, 2012). She also considers herself in many ways a frontier-dweller.

Grab a copy of Baldwin, Styron, and Me here!

About MAY OUR JOY ENDURE

Finalist for the 2025 Governor General’s Literary Award in Translation • A Walrus Best Book of Fall 2024 • A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024 • Winner of the 2023 Prix Médicis, Prix Décembre, and Prix Ringuet

Céline Wachowski, internationally renowned architect and accidental digital-culture icon, unveils her plans for the Webuy Complex, her first megaproject in Montreal, her hometown. But instead of the triumph she anticipates in finally bringing her reputation to bear in her own city, the project is excoriated by critics, who accuse her of callously destroying the social fabric of neighborhoods, ushering in a new era of gentrification, and many even deadlier sins. When she is deposed as CEO of her firm, Céline must make sense of the charges against herself and the people in her elite circle. For the first time in danger of losing their footing, what fictions must they tell themselves to justify their privilege and maintain their position in the world that they themselves have built?

Moving fluidly between Céline’s perspective and the perspectives of her critics, and revealing both the ruthlessness of her methods and the brilliance of her aesthetic vision, May Our Joy Endure is a shrewd examination of the microcosm of the ultra-privileged and a dazzling social novel that depicts with razor-sharp acuity the terrible beauty of wealth, influence, and art.

Donald Winkler is a translator of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. He is a three-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for French-to-English translation. He lives in Montreal.

Grab a copy of May Our Joy Endure here!

The Bibliophile: A reminder of their humanity

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The introduction to Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide

Last week another ceasefire was declared in Palestine. This is the third one in two years. I think we all hope this ceasefire will hold, but it is difficult to be certain if it will. In these past two years, we’ve seen countless photos and videos of people in pain, of bombs being dropped on innocent people, of cities in ruin, of Palestinians being starved and stripped of their humanity. It is hard to see all that death and destruction and not want to do something about it.

Three days ago, we published the North American edition of Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide, a collection of diaries by Batool Abu Akleen, Nahil Mohana, Ala’a Obaid, and Sondos Sabra; four Palestinian women, all poets and writers, documenting their daily lives in Gaza from October 2023 to March 2025.

Photo: Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide by Batool Abu Akleen, Nahil Mohana, Ala’a Obaid, and Sondos Sabra. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Their diaries provide a rare and intimate perspective, giving us an on-the-ground, real-time look at what it is like to live during a genocide. It is a beautifully written, devastating account filled with unimaginable heartbreaking moments and ordinary relatable ones. Faced with constant bombing and multiple displacements, it shows how they adapt and persevere with empathy and humour. Thoughts of fear and death mix with nostalgia for a more peaceful time and the practical, mundane tasks of life that must go on, as well as hope for the future. This is a book about resilience as a form of resistance. It is a reminder of the violence that happened, but also of their humanity and their refusal to be silenced or erased from history.

Below you’ll find the introduction to the collection written by Caryl Churchill. You can also read an excerpt from one of Sondos Sabra’s diaries in the Truthdig, and a new entry from her published yesterday in the Guardian. All the money we make from this book will go directly to the authors and their families. I hope you’ll consider buying a copy.

Ahmed,
Publicist

Introduction to Voices of Resistance

by Caryl Churchill

We all know what’s happening in Gaza. Or we know something of it. Some people may not have thought about it before and imagine the trouble started when Hamas broke into Israel in October 2023. Others know more of the history of Palestine including, in relatively modern times, the British Empire, Zionism, the Nakba, the founding of Israel and the oppression and occupation that have gone on for 77 years.

But what very few of us know is what it’s like to be in Gaza. Though we can see it on our screens, we can’t go there. For many years it’s been almost impossible to visit friends or simply visit the place, like any other place, and almost impossible to leave what has effectively become a large prison. After October 2023, what we saw on our screens was heavily weighted towards the Israeli families who’d had hostages taken. Their characters and suffering were individualised while, as more and more Palestinians were being killed, Gazan sufferings were often just reported as numbers. We could learn more from Al Jazeera and sometimes from Channel 4. Even the BBC has recently begun to show what is happening, as people have become more and more incredulous and appalled.

Read the full starred review of Voices of Resistance from Publishers Weekly.

But with any long catastrophe, there’s a danger that those of us outside of it become numbed, or distracted by the ins and outs of our own lives. Whether it’s a war, an earthquake, or a famine, the watcher can begin to feel—however much they know it’s not true—that the suffering people are those suffering people; that it’s somehow not the same as if the bomb had fallen in our own street, or our own children had no water to drink. But for these four women the ins and outs of their lives are suddenly astonishingly changed and we can see and feel that.

History, of course, is often the victors’ story. Israel wants that story to be theirs and is quick to try to suppress others. In 2024, Comma, the [UK] publisher of this book, took a show of Palestinian readings to HOME arts centre in Manchester—it was cancelled because of Zionist protests then reinstated because of local sup-port. It went to Edinburgh and then to the Barbican, where extracts from some of these diaries were added, and where UK Lawyers for Israel labelled it ‘illegal’. Though so much else was happening to them, these readings meant something important to the writers: their voices were being heard.

Read an excerpt of Sondos Sabra’s diaries from Voices of Resistance in Truthdig.

Here is what it’s like to leave your home and leave again and again, be parted from your family, have a bomb fall next door, shells burst through the window, a tank attack you, lose your friend, lose children. And how ordinary things keep on at the same time, anxiety about an exam while under bombardment, and here, ordinary things change: sharing a bathroom with 30 people, queuing hours for bread, looking all day for an egg for a birthday cake, climbing over rubble as you walk down the street. Here are so many loves: for a strong father aged by war, a four-year-old sister helping make dough, a daughter playing games on a phone, a younger brother who likes to wear white and is seized and tortured, a childhood friend to laugh with, so many in each family. Here is food: the biscuit that crumbles like snow and later the food shortage, the boredom of peas. Here is a cat carried in a bag and the fat cats who have fed on rubbish and human corpses. And here is constant death: the big young man whose shroud holds remains as small as a baby’s, the nephew deaf in one ear who liked watching anime, the baby whose first tooth had just come through, the child who died as she slept and her mother’s wail: ‘I wish I hadn’t put her to bed early.’

Here is a birth and what that’s like when hospitals can hardly function, the baby falling on his head but unharmed, the death of the friend who brought baby clothes a few days earlier. Here are jokes about the things Gazans now hold records for, and the noises made by different weapons, and the seller of cigarettes: one for six, two for fifteen. Here are memories of what it was like before and a determination that one day ordinary life can be lived again.

Read the latest diary entry from Voices of Resistance contributor Sondos Sabra, featured in The Guardian.

Batool’s diary is the shortest and heartbreakingly ends with the joy of the January 24 ceasefire and anguish at how hard it will be to go forward. With Sondos and Nahil, we see the relief of the ceasefire and the exhaustion and grief when Israel breaks the truce and the bombing starts again. We know what the diaries don’t reach: how much worse things will get. As I’m writing, in May 2025, there are more deaths every day, terrible hunger, talk of a takeover by Israel, talk of a truce, talk of Gazans forced to live somewhere else, and increasing outrage round the world, though our government shamefully supports Israel while saying it would like peace. The four diarists, I’m told, are alive.

Batool, Sondos, Nahil and Ala’a, thank you for letting me and others read your diaries, thank you for managing to write while so much was happening. Does it seem ridiculous to say your diaries are enjoyable? They’re painful and make us angry but it’s still a pleasure to know something of your lives. And your history.

May 16, 2025

Awards news:

In other good publicity news:

  • Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide received a starred review from Publishers Weekly: “[A] stunning collection . . . The four women’s descriptions of constant violence are vivid, and so too are their accounts of profound kindness and care . . . This bursts with life in the face of shocking horror.”
  • An excerpt from Voices of Resistance contributor Sondos Sabra appeared in Truthdig, and a new entry was featured in the Guardian.
  • Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet was featured the Guardian’s crime fiction round-up: “Dark, intense and utterly compelling.”
  • Self Care by Russell Smith was reviewed in the Ottawa Review of Books: “Self Care is a revealing rollercoaster ride, a compassionate yet unflinching window into troubled lives of today’s young adults.”
  • Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc) was reviewed in the Ottawa Review of Books: “Important and very timely . . . An enthralling read of enormous value.”
  • Ray Robertson was featured in the Chatham Daily News about his forthcoming Dust: More Lives of the Poets (with Guitars): “A followup to 2016’s Lives of the Poets (with Guitars), it features more big-name and lesser-known performers, from Danny Kirwan, Handsome Ned, Captain Beefheart and Nico to Duane Allman and Muddy Waters.”

THE HOLLOW BEAST and UNMET shortlisted for the QWF Literary Awards!

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We’re thrilled to share that today, on Wednesday, October 15, two Biblioasis books have been announced as finalists for the 2025 Quebec Writers’ Federation Literary Awards! UNMET by stephanie roberts was shortlisted for the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry, and Lazer Lederhendler’s translation of The Hollow Beast by Christophe Bernard was shortlisted for the Cole Foundation Prize for Translation.

View the full finalists announcement on the QWF website here.

The winners of QWF Literary Awards’ seven prestigious prizes will be announced at the 2025 QWF Literary Awards Gala on Monday, November 10 at Cabaret Lion d’Or (1676 Ontario St. E.). The ceremony begins at 8:00 pm, preceded by a cocktail reception from 6:30 to 7:30 pm. The event will be hosted by broadcaster, arts journalist, and translator Shelley Pomerance.

Each award comes with a purse of $3,000. The cash prize for the Ian Ferrier Spoken Word Prize will be split equally between one to three winners.

About UNMET

This is what comes of taking dreams / off the horizon. It is the sun / or nothing else, you would scream / if you weren’t caught up in the chorus.

Leaning deliberately on the imagined while scrutinizing reality and hoping for the as-yet-unseen, UNMET explores frustration, justice, and thwarted rescue from a perspective that is Black-Latinx, Canadian, immigrant, and female. Drawing on a wide range of poetics, from Wallace Stevens to Diane Seuss, roberts’s musically-driven narrative surrealism confronts such timely issues as police brutality, respectability politics, intimate partner violence, and ecological crisis, and considers the might-have-been alongside the what-could-be, negotiating with the past without losing hope for the future.

stephanie roberts is the prize-winning author of the poetry collections UNMET and rushes from the river disappointment, which was a finalist for the 2020 A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Her work has been critically praised and widely featured in numerous periodicals and anthologies such as Poetry, Arc Poetry, Event Magazine, The New Quarterly, Verse Daily, Crannóg (Ireland), The Stockholm Review of Literature, and elsewhere. Winner of The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018 (Black Mountain Press), she was born in Panama, grew up in NYC, and has lived most of her life in Quebec.

Grab a copy of UNMET here!

About THE HOLLOW BEAST

Winner of the 2025 French-American Translation Prize in Fiction • Finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award in Translation • A Globe and Mail Most Anticipated Spring Title

1911. A hockey game in Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. With the score tied two-two in overtime, local tough guy Billy Joe Pictou fires the puck directly into Monti Bouge’s mouth. When Pictou’s momentum carries them both across the goal line in a spray of shattered teeth, Victor Bradley, erstwhile referee and local mailman, rules that the goal counts—and Monti’s ensuing revenge for this injustice sprawls across three generations, one hundred years, and dozens of dastardly deeds. Fuelled by a bottomless supply of Yukon, the high-proof hooch that may or may not cause the hallucinatory sightings of a technicolor beast that haunts not just Monti but his descendants, it’s up to Monti’s grandson François—and his floundering doctoral dissertation—to make sense of the vendetta that’s shaped the destiny of their town and everyone in it. Brilliantly translated into slapstick English by Lazer Lederhendler, The Hollow Beast introduces Christophe Bernard as a master of epic comedy.

Lazer Lederhendler is a veteran literary translator specializing in Québécois fiction and non-fiction. He has also translated 20th-century Yiddish literature. His work has earned distinctions in Canada, the UK, and the USA, most recently the French-American Foundation’s 2025 Translation Prize for The Hollow Beast. Among the authors he has translated are Gaétan Soucy, Nicolas Dickner, Edem Awumey, Perrine Leblanc, Catherine Leroux, Alain Farah, Itzik Manger and Melekh Ravitch. He lives in Montreal with the artist Pierrette Bouchard.

Grab a copy of The Hollow Beast here!

The Bibliophile: The Unyielding Human Voice

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A few notes from John Metcalf, followed by a Biblioasis interview with Elise Levine, author of Big of You

When I happened upon Elise Levine’s stories in 1994 or thereabouts I was editing for Porcupine’s Quill press. What struck me about even her earliest work—and I do mean ‘struck’—was how polished and sophisticated it was; she was aeons ahead of her contemporaries having been reading Beckett at the age of fifteen.

“In his works I find a means with which to capture the psychic and emotional states of betweenness, constraint, defiance, the craft involved in giving shape to the tension between the abjection of self-exile and the unyielding human voice. I grasp how what is not said on the page can speak volumes: how silence itself can render an eloquent and moving subtext, and wrenchingly convey the unspeakable” (Elise Levine, Off the Record, Biblioasis 2023).

She refers more than once—though not directly—to Beckett’s play Not I (1973), a play in which Billie Whitelaw was shrouded entirely in black cloth with only her mouth illuminated—and the spotlit mouth delivered at tumbling speed a flooding monologue. This is the way I hear Elise’s fictions; her stories can be described as instruments performing a voice. She has no patience for plot, for ‘what happens next’; her stories are intricate solos; she wants us not to think but to listen; she demands our surrender to the performance.

John Metcalf

A Biblioasis Interview with Elise Levine

DB: Big of You was my introduction to your work. I loved it so much, I’ve been working my way backwards through your catalogue. I’m curious to know how you see Big of You as being different, or a shift away, from your previous books.

EL: Thank you for the love! Big of You extends what I’ve done in previous books, in which I’ve explored questions about power and voiced-over lives and defiance. I carried these concerns with me in writing Big of You, but I also saw it from the outset as more focused than my first two story collections and at times lighter in tone and more sardonic than my novels and novellas. This book full-on centers ambition, striving, the puncturing of expectations, the capacity for self-deceit, and the delight in potentialities and capabilities. Before I began writing the stories in Big of You, I saw it having a clear overall architecture: I would braid the stories together by linking some of the characters through paired narratives in which the characters appear at different points of their lives or otherwise intersect with the situations and preoccupations of other characters. I knew too, before I began writing any of the stories, that I would lean heavily on fabulist or surreal elements to capture lives lived—or entertaining the possibility of living—beyond imposed expectations, and that these elements would help get at the strange internal weather and sea changes over time that personhood can entail.

Elise Levine. Photo credit: Britt Olsen-Ecker.

Big of You strikes me as primarily character-driven. It’s also very attentive to language, but I imagine largely as a means of representing the peculiarities of character (correct me if I’m wrong). What is it about character that appeals to you? How do you discover and approach a new character? Do you ever find the seeds of character in your own life?

I’ve always been a character-driven writer, and yes, I use language—foregrounding it, even—fully in service of evoking character, because in character lies the Big Question: we have these single lifetimes—as far as I know—and what do we do with them? In view of the dark door of individual extinction we all must pass through. And the possibility, that continues to rapidly feel more pressing, of the extinction of humans as a species, along with every other living thing on this planet. My initial ideas for character strike out of the blue and then I spend time in what I think of as a pre-writing stage: writing partial scenes, especially the opening and endings, and making notes on who the characters might be, what their situation is. Fully developing the character, their story, typically takes me a scandalous amount of time and a crazy number of drafts in which I keep digging deeper, further in, asking what does this character really want, what do they fear? Sometimes characters do initially lift from my own life. I mean, I was once a teenage girl let loose for a summer in Europe, as in the story “Arnhem,” which opens the book. I once lived in an apartment in which the living room was dominated—menaced?—by a baby grand piano, as in “Penetrating Wind Over Open Lake.” But with both of these stories, as was the case with others in which I borrowed details from my own life, when I began writing them in earnest the narratives soon wildly diverged from my personal histories and took on their own beast lives.

Don’t miss Big of You and other great Biblioasis titles on the Globe and Mail’s Fall 2025 books list!

One of my favourite stories in Big of You is the three-part “Cooler.” For those who haven’t read it yet, the first part follows a sad-sack casino worker, the second an isolated spacecraft, and the third part features a grumpy, supernatural creature with a blue tail (these short descriptions really don’t do the story justice). The three sections are wildly different in tone. In a recent interview with The Ex-Puritan, you explain that the story arose from an interest in the concept of “coolness” and how what’s cool might be variously depicted. I love that, and wonder if any of the other stories in Big of You began in distinct ways (even if not necessarily derived from a concept)?

Yes, each of the other stories in the book did begin in distinct ways, but usually with a strong sense of character and situation, and a sense of voice and form. For example, I knew from the outset that for “Return to Forever,” which is about three older women who vacation together in the desert at Joshua Tree, while a fourth friend remains back home in a memory-card ward, I would use the first-person-plural point of view and sweeping, single-paragraph sections to evoke a communal voice. In “Witch Well,” the final story, I knew I wanted, before I even began writing it, to use a heightened fabulist approach and a kind of Stepford Wives vibe—along with a tone of perky defiance—to portray a woman’s grief and confusions over a profound loss against a backdrop of the seductive erasures of affluence.

Read Elise’s new interview with Zilla Jones in All Lit Up.

I mentioned that “Cooler” is one of my favourites in the collection. Do you have a favourite story, or perhaps a character that you still think about with fondness or a sense of kinship?

I do feel a weird tenderness toward the main character in “Once Then Suddenly Later,” Adrien Tournachon, a nineteenth-century historical figure whose older brother, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon—better known by his pseudonym Nadar—is a central figure in the history of early modernity. He was a noted proponent of heavier-than-air flight—which led to the development of airplanes—which he advocated for through a series of catastrophic balloon flights. Along the way he invented aerial photography and air mail and underground photography, and was celebrated for his vivid, individualistic photographic portraits of luminaries such as George Sand, Victor Hugo, and Sarah Bernhardt. But his younger brother, Adrien, my main character, suffers from living in the shadow of his older and successful brother. My character is his own worst enemy: he drinks and squanders his time and lesser talents, at one point steals his famous older brother’s identity, lies about his own whereabouts and stature, and never fails to wallow in bitter self-pity. I don’t feel kinship with him, but I do feel for him: he stands in for the perils of striving to lead an artistic, creative life.

You’ve been a professor for a while now, and you teach in the program at Johns Hopkins University. How do you think teaching writing has influenced your own work?

Teaching fosters the excellent practice of generosity as a reader: it keeps me reading closely, open to a multiplicity of stylistic and formal approaches, and with an admiration and respect for other writers’ willingness to explore the infinite ways of what it means to be human. All of which keeps the creative wheels spinning in terms of my own work. Beyond a doubt, it’s a generative circuit, teaching writing and writing.

Have you read anything lately that you’d like to recommend?

Well, a ton of books! But I’ll try to keep myself decent and mention just a few. The story collections Other Worlds by André Alexis and Hellions by Julia Elliott: both are great examples of using fabulist elements to explore the shifts and surprises of selfhood, and both use language and form in innovative ways. Two Booker-longlisted novels: Audition by Katie Kitamura and Flesh by David Szalay, both of whose previous books I’ve loved. In these latest by Kitamura and Szalay, each very distinct from the other, language and form are nearly electric, and used to pose questions about hairpin twists and turns of identity. Another novel, The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana, I admired for its brilliantly controlled sentences and pacing, its taut and suspenseful narrative and vivid interiority—and its ability to generate tremendous empathy, despite the moral horrors it depicts. I also recommend two poetry collections, also quite different from each other: New and Collected Hell by Shane McCrae and Little Mercy by Robin Walter. Both books possess tremendous formal clarity and a just-go-for-it approach to digging deep into what it means to be conscious in this strange world we inhabit, for better or for worse. I habitually read a lot of books in translation and I’ll mention here just one of my favourites (okay, it’s actually a two-fer): On the Calculation of Volume (Books I and II), part of a seven-novel series by Solvej Balle, translated into English from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland. These first two in the series offer a lovely, surreal portrait of a woman experiencing suspended time, and uses a circumspect, minimalist tone and style—which achieves a nearly hallucinatory quality through its ultra-grounded and slow-paced approach to revealing the beauty and constancy of the many ordinary details of existence. I can’t wait for the remaining books in the series to come out in translation.

In good publicity news:

  • Four Biblioasis books made the Globe and Mail’s list of “61 books to lose yourself in this fall”:
    • Self Care by Russell Smith: “Smith is still at it in this story of a female journalist whose relationship with a man she’s ostensibly interviewing for an article on incel culture starts crossing into risky sexual and emotional territory.”
    • Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney: “The Irish author’s follow-up to the Booker-nominated How to Build a Boat involves a woman who [returns home] in the wake of her mother’s death and her father’s cancer diagnosis.”
    • Big of You by Elise Levine: “Reading the still criminally underappreciated Levine is a visceral experience that seems to demand engagement of all one’s senses.”
    • Sacred Rage: Selected Stories by Steven Heighton: “[Heighton] believed the short story was his greatest contribution to literature. For this collection, [his editor] Metcalf assembled 15 of what he deems the author’s best.”
  • Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet was reviewed in the Daily Mail and on FictionFan’s Book Review Blog:
    • Daily Mail: “A furtive, cagey novel reminiscent of Macrae’s Booker-shortlisted gem, His Bloody Project . . . In recounting one murder, Macrae subtly introduces the idea of another to produce a consummate slice of alternative true crime.”
    • FictionFan’s Book Review blog: “Burnet’s writing is wonderful, as always, and diving deeply into complex characters is one of his great strengths . . . Highly recommended.”
  • Russell Smith was interviewed about Self Care on The Commentary podcast.
  • Marcello Di Cintio was interviewed about Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers on the Collisions YYC podcast: “From farms to care homes, Marcello illuminates a hard truth: we rely on foreign labour to survive, yet deny these workers a place to truly belong.”
  • Illustrations from Seth’s Christmas Ghost Stories 2025 were featured in the LRC Bookworm.
  • Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick was reviewed in Necessary Fiction: “Chadwick’s prose is rich and poetic, containing surprising images and gorgeous complexities . . . leaving the reader hungry to see what the author will do next.”

The Bibliophile: History is never truly in the past

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Elaine Feeney’s latest novel, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way, which comes out next week, has been called her most ambitious. And not just by me. It is about many things: colonialism, tradwives, inherited trauma and shame, the politics of the domestic space, the end of love and a second chance at it. The novel follows an Irish woman named Claire who returns to her family home after many years in England. Her parents have recently died. Her long-term relationship ended. She’s alone and spiraling. So she does what most of us do these days: go online and admire those leading perfectly curated lives. And like the best of us, she takes it too far.

Photo: Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney. Cover designed by Kate Sinclair.

What I loved most about it is how the story unfolds, its structure (“baggy, complex” and “hugely satisfying” as Barney Norris in the Guardian said of it in his review), with a narrative that shifts back and forth across time to show us Claire’s past and how the effects of the violence inflicted on her family echoes down the line—and how she tries to change. It’s almost like a sociological approach to literature, telling a story about the institution of repression in Ireland and its connections to modern tradwifery.

It has been great seeing the response to the novel so far, and how the story resonates. It was even included in the inaugural Booksellers’ List from the Canadian Independent Booksellers Association, making it one of the top 20 books of the fall season as voted on by independent Canadian booksellers. Thank you to CIBA and all the booksellers who voted for it.

And if you’re into bookish events, Elaine will be visiting North America later this month for readings and conversations in Vancouver, Ottawa, Connecticut, and New York. Stop by if you can.

And now what you’ve all been waiting for: the interview. I had a chance to ask Elaine a few questions over email. Read on if you’d like to know her thoughts on her book.

All my best,

Ahmed
Publicist

A Biblioasis Interview with Elaine Feeney

Can you tell me a bit about yourself and how this book came about?

I live in the west of Ireland in a 1970s bungalow surrounded by fields. It’s one of those Bungalow Bliss houses built from Jack Fitzsimons’ guide back in the 1970’s, this was popular in Ireland where these houses were usually on family land next to the “home house”—a small turn of century cottage that was pretty much just a big kitchen and a loft. Those spaces, and their complicated history, really inspired Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way.

The novel follows the O’Connor family from the west of Ireland, the Black and Tans era right up to the slightly surreal world of tradwife influencers today. I’ve always been drawn to the political power of ordinary domestic spaces, especially the Irish kitchen, which holds so much hidden history and tension and sadness (violence) in Ireland.

Photo: Elaine Feeney’s previous novels, As You Were and How to Build a Boat.

You’ve said previously that you see your three novels so far as examining different institutions: As You Were looked at the hospital, How to Build a Boat looked at the school, and now Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way explores the home/the kitchen. Why the home this time, and what draws you to institutions?

The kitchen has always fascinated me. In Ireland, it’s never just been about cooking or comfort—it’s where history happened. The Black and Tans terrorised people in their kitchens and I really wanted to try to write about this in tandem with Ireland’s dire history of its treatment of women post colonisation: Women were judged, removed, and incarcerated based on what happened within those four walls. It’s been a space of ceremony, loss, survival, and control. I have worked a lot with the long history of institutions in Ireland, and the kitchen seems the most political.

Across my books, I keep coming back to places where care and coercion live side by side. Hospitals, schools, homes—they’re all institutions that are supposed to help, but have historically often end up judging or punishing people instead.

The novel starts with a quote by Annie Ernaux about shame. What role does shame play in the family and the story?

Shame runs deep through the O’Connors’ story. After Irish independence, land ownership became a symbol of respectability and survival. Families clung to that image, and women were made the moral gatekeepers. A spotless house, well-behaved kids, clean laundry—it all reflected on the family’s name. This fascinates me with the rise again of fascism and tradwifery.

Claire, the oldest daughter in the novel, inherits not just her family’s bungalow, but the silence, secrets, and expectations that come with it. The shame of what happened to her mother weighs on her heavily. It becomes this silent, suffocating burden that shapes her actions and her grief.

Read an excerpt from Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way featured in Literary Hub.

Claire and her brothers also grieve their parents very differently. What were you trying to show with that?

I wanted to show how siblings experience family history and loss in very different ways. Claire retreats into obsessive domestic rituals to avoid facing her grief and the painful truth of her mother’s death, while her brother Conor carries the family’s legacy in a more external way.

The family is haunted not just by recent grief, but by the trauma of a century of violence, loss, and silence. In Ireland, history has a habit of lingering at the kitchen table, and for the O’Connors that’s definitely true.

Claire turns to a tradwife influencer as a way of coping, which on the surface seems to help her. Where did that idea come from?

It came from my own doom-scrolling, honestly! I kept coming across these soft-spoken, perfect women on Instagram or TikTok, arranging lemons or lighting candles in perfectly curated kitchens while the world burned outside. It fascinated (and unsettled) me. Was it harmless escapism or a soft return to old-fashioned control of women’s roles?

For Claire, following “Kelly Purchase”—my fictional tradwife influencer—isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about desperately trying to impose control over a life that feels completely out of control. It gives her temporary comfort but ultimately isolates her even more.

I love how the novel is structured, moving back and forth across time. Why did you decide to shape it that way?

I wanted it to feel like the piecing together an old family heirloom that’s been damaged or lost over time. Claire’s mind is fragmented, disoriented by grief and avoidance, so the structure mirrors that. It is also very much about the juxtaposition of banality and brutality. (The present in tandem with the future).

In a way, it’s also how so many Irish family histories are passed down—in fragments, in silences, and in stories half-told around the kitchen table. The shifting timelines let me explore how unresolved trauma and silence can distort identity and memory.

Check out the latest review of Russell Smith’s Self Care in the Globe and Mail.

Is there anything you hope people take away after reading the novel?

I hope people think about what domestic order hides as well as what it provides. The Irish kitchen has been a place of warmth and nourishment, yes—but also of judgement, punishment, and even violence.

This tradwife trend might seem harmless on the surface, but I wanted to explore how it risks reinforcing systems we’ve fought hard to dismantle. Claire’s journey shows how dangerous it can be to seek safety through compliance and control.

Seamus Heaney said, “Whatever you say, say nothing,” but I wanted this novel to say something: that history is never truly in the past, and silence can become a prison.

In good publicity news:

  • Self Care by Russell Smith was featured twice in the Globe and Mail:
    • Reviewed by Emily M. Keeler: “Smith’s bleak, horny comedy holds up a funhouse mirror to an aspect of the human condition that feels unique but has always endured . . . There is an undeniably stylish brutality to his portrait of desperately lonely urbanites; when it hits you, you just might laugh.”
    • Mentioned in an op-ed on satire by Mark Kingwell.
  • Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet appeared in several outlets this week:
    • Reviewed in The Scotsman: “Elegant, eerie . . . Perhaps the most impressive feature of the novella is the sense of simmering . . . Macrae Burnet conjures an atmosphere of suppression.”
    • Reviewed in The Book Beat.
    • Graeme Macrae Burnet was interviewed on The Scots Whay Hae! Podcast.
  • Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio was featured in The Scene’s article on Calgary literature.
  • On Book Banning by Ira Wells was mentioned in Kirkus Reviews’ article, “Book Banning Has Always Been With Us.”
  • On Oil by Don Gillmor was reviewed in Alberta Views: “A short, incisive, at times rollicking book.”
  • Seth’s 2025 Christmas Ghost Stories were reviewed in The Book Beat: “Each story, from cover to inside decorations . . . sets the scene and mood, while never giving anything away: They’re the creaky door that invites you inside, the things bumped into in the night.”

The Bibliophile: Welcome to work but not to remain

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An introduction to Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio

In Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, which publishes next Tuesday, Marcello Di Cintio travels across Canada (from the Okanagan, to Leamington, to Goose Bay, Newfoundland) to document the experiences of migrant workers, destabilizing the popular notion of Canada as a safe, welcoming space where migrants can escape the hardships of their home countries.

Contrarily, Di Cintio highlights a recent UN report that describes the Temporary Foreign Worker Program as a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.”

Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio. Cover designed by Kate Sinclair.

There was so much I didn’t know about migrant policy and programs, about the prevalent unsafe housing, constant harassment, and unstable pay experienced by the workers every day. Or I knew about some of it, but only vaguely, at the back of my mind, the way I imagine millions of Canadians “know” about these issues. Precarious is filled with many of the harrowing, chaotic stories of precarity that make up the modern migrant experience in Canada. In a time of heightened, near-propagandistic Canadian patriotism, Precarious feels like such an important book to recalibrate our sense of identity, and our sense of what can be done to improve, rather than abolish, migrant labour in Canada.

I recommend taking the time to read Di Cintio’s beautifully angry op-ed in today’s Globe and Mail, which he writes in response to Poilievre’s call to scrap the TFWP and deny visas to new migrants:

“I wonder . . . how many see the irony of being lectured about the ills of foreign labour by a recently unemployed man from 2,600 kilometres away—about as far from the riding as Chihuahua, Mexico—who showed up to take the job of a local resident.”

And I hope you’ll find the time to read the following excerpt from Precarious—taken from the introduction—which lays the groundwork for the book by pulling from Di Cintio’s familial experiences of migrant labour, and how these differ drastically from more recent experiences uncovered in later chapters.

Dominique
Publicity & Marketing Coordinator

An excerpt from Precarious

Introduction

My grandfather was a migrant worker before such a thing existed.

Amedeo Sorrentino was born in 1923 and hardly a man when Mussolini forced him into the Italian infantry. In my favourite photo of him, he is wearing his army uniform and holding a cigarette between his fingers. My grandfather never smoked, but the photographer told him the cigarette would make him look older. After the photo was taken, the army shipped Amedeo across the sea to North Africa, handed him a rifle, and sent him out into the desert. British soldiers quickly decimated his regiment, and Amedeo was taken prisoner. He spent the rest of the war in a London POW camp.

After the war, Amedeo returned to his hometown of Lanciano and learned that his mother had died. Shrapnel from a grenade struck her in the back and killed her instantly as she sat in the village square with Amedeo’s youngest brother on her lap. My grandfather never hesitated to retell his war stories, and they were harrowing, but he didn’t like talking about what his family endured during those years. “The real war was back home,” he’d say before growing quiet.

My grandfather met my grandmother, Giulia, a few years later. Amedeo was not the first suitor to come calling. There were “lots of boys to choose from,” she once told me. One was a police officer, but policemen were not allowed to marry until they were thirty, and Giulia didn’t want to marry an “old man.” She chose Amedeo because he was the only one to make her laugh. Their courtship involved walking back from church together with family chaperones following a few paces behind them.

An interview with Marcello Di Cintio in the Calgary Herald.

Because they were both poor, Giulia and Amedeo waited until after Easter to announce their engagement so they wouldn’t have to give holiday gifts to each other’s families. Giulia’s mother, Guiseppina, did not approve of the engagement. “Why do you want to marry someone poorer than you are?” she asked her eldest daughter. They married on a rainy day in 1948 after their borrowed car got stuck in the mud and had to be pulled free by an ox. The family ate the wedding dinner in Giulia’s parents’ bedroom, the largest room in the house. Afterwards one of Amedeo’s friends set off firecrackers he made from unexploded artillery shells he’d found in the fields.

Amedeo vowed never to leave home again. He’d found happiness with Giulia and wanted to raise a family with her in the country that he loved. Their first daughter, my mother, was born later that year, then two more girls in the years that followed. Amedeo toiled as a tenant tobacco farmer to support them. The landowner allowed Amedeo to keep and sell only half of the harvest. With no sons, Amedeo did most of the labour himself. He found extra work at his uncle Nicola’s olive oil press. Though Amedeo had little education—he’d reached only the fifth grade before leaving school—he was good with numbers and did his uncle’s accounting.

For all his love of Italy and his promise to never leave it, Amedeo knew he could never properly provide for his family by working on someone else’s farm. Men were leaving Italy every day to find work abroad, and Giulia persuaded Amedeo to follow his sister and brother-in-law to Canada, at least for a couple of years. Amedeo obliged and set off in 1956. He sent back a photo of himself waving from the deck of the Canada-bound ship. A note on the back written in black ink read: “As soon as I lifted my hand, my first thought was of returning soon to my family, and to my beautiful Italy.”

Before World War II and the Great Depression preceding it, most immigrant workers to Canada came to develop the agricultural economy of the Prairies. After the war, though, Canada’s booming industrial economy needed urban workers: people to build things, not just grow things. Many Italians ended up on construction sites in cities like Toronto, Montreal, and in my grandfather’s case, Calgary. Amedeo poured concrete during the day and tended to greenhouses at night. Years later, my grandfather would look out at the Calgary skyline and point to the buildings he helped build, including Foothills Hospital where I was born.

With the money Amedeo sent back to Italy, Giulia was able to buy a bicycle for her daughters and a record player for herself. One day, a vinyl record appeared in the mail from Canada: a recording of his cousins singing songs in a small Calgary studio. Amedeo was on the album, too. He had recorded a message for his wife and daughters, telling them that he loved and missed them. There were no telephones in Lanciano at that time, and this was the first Giulia had heard her husband’s voice in over a year. The arrival of the record was both a blessing and a tragedy. For all the marvellous joy it brought to hear Amedeo’s voice, the record reminded everyone that he was far away.

My grandfather didn’t want to stay in Canada. He wanted to save enough money to build a better life for his wife and daughters back home. Maybe buy some land and a bigger house. He wanted to be temporary. After two years, though, he and Giulia decided that it would be better for the family to live in Canada than to reunite back in Italy. Nonno resisted, but Nonna was stubborn. With the money Amedeo had sent them, Giulia and their daughters boarded the RMS Saxonia for the long, seasick journey west. The girls insisted on bringing their new bicycle with them. It lasted for decades, and I used to ride it around my grandparents’ neighbourhood when I was a child. Nonna left the behind the album that brought so much happiness for the family with Amedeo’s sister, Ersiglia. When Amedeo and Giulia returned to visit Italy years later and inquired about the album, Ersiglia claimed the mice ate it.

I doubt Amedeo and Giulia knew the role their whiteness played in their journey to Canada. The entry of non-white immigrants was restricted until 1962 when the federal government expunged overt racial discrimination from our immigration policy. Even afterwards, though, bigotry proved a tough habit to break. Anyone from anywhere was now permitted into the country as long as they demonstrated they could succeed here, but preference was given to people from Europe. And only Canadians from the United States and certain European and Middle Eastern nations could sponsor the immigration of their siblings. In the early sixties, my grandfather sponsored his sister and two brothers to come to Canada, a privilege he wouldn’t have enjoyed had he been Black or Asian.

My nonno died in July 2020 during the first fraught COVID summer. He’d been living in an extended-care facility since a stroke felled him a couple of years earlier. Nonno received initial treatment at the Foothills Hospital, and during a particularly painful injection quipped to my mother, “I never should’ve helped build this place.”

Due to the pandemic restrictions, fewer than fifty invited family members, masked and distanced, attended his funeral mass. When I stood at the front of the church to give his eulogy and looked out at the sparse attendees, I knew that the church would have overflowed with mourners had Nonno passed even a few months earlier. My grandfather was one of the first links in an immigration chain that brought dozens of families to Calgary. No doubt hundreds of the city’s Italians can trace their history back to my grandfather’s reluctant passage across the Atlantic.

Circumstances have changed for workers from abroad since then. Even though my grandfather came to work and never intended to stay, Canada granted him landed immigrant status upon his arrival. He had a choice to immigrate or not. Had my grandfather made the same journey even a decade later, he’d likely be considered a “temporary foreign worker”: welcome to work but not to remain. A labourer, yes. Not a link.

Marcello’s recent op-ed in the Globe and Mail.

Nonno’s passing made me think of his contemporary counterparts. My grandfather only wanted the best for his daughters, and he was willing to sacrifice years away from them for the opportunities Canada would eventually provide. No doubt today’s migrant workers make the same bargain. But what does it mean to voyage far from family to a nation that wants you to work but doesn’t want you to stay? Bring your arms and backs, Canada pleads, but leave the rest on the other side of the border. We need your sweat. We don’t need your stories.

But I did. After my grandfather died, I set out to hear the stories of migrant workers in Canada. I knew nothing about these newcomers. I wondered about their days in our country, the lives and loved ones they left behind, and what compelled them to first make their long journeys here. I wondered, too, if they believed their time in Canada made up for their sacrifices and absences. Was our country worth it?

I spent the following three years travelling the country to meet workers and their advocates, pausing my wanderings for intermittent pandemic shutdowns and travel restrictions. I quickly learned that my image of a migrant worker was sorely limited. I thought I’d be spending all my time speaking to Latino farmhands and Filipina “nannies.” But I found that migrant labour exists within all aspects of Canadian society. Temporary workers are everywhere. They build our homes, drive our trucks, clean our offices, and pour our coffee. Many of Canada’s post-secondary institutions are propped up with the foreign tuition paid by international students who, most of the time, are also migrant workers. The complexity overwhelmed me at times. The more people I spoke to, the more threads emerged. I wish I could have followed them all, but the diverse workers I did manage to speak to expanded my perspective of what migrant labour encompassed.

For the most part, I heard the kinds of stories I expected to hear. I learned about how calamities back home—a sick child, a dying wife, a hurricane—compelled people from around the world to seek financial opportunities here. I heard stories of redemption, reinvention, and romance. I learned about workers sending their overseas families gifts of maple syrup and Toronto Maple Leafs caps to stand in for the physical embraces their long separation denies them. I smiled at the baby photos on their cellphones. I cheered workers on soccer fields and watched the dance videos they recorded in their greenhouses. I heard about lovers the workers had left back home, and the lovers they found here.

What I didn’t expect, though, was how often Canada itself was the source of the migrants’ trauma. Despite the sufferings many workers escaped, a sea of troubles awaited them here. Nearly every worker I spoke to had been done wrong. Cheated. Threatened. Beaten. The abuse nearly always came at the hands of my fellow citizens. I realized I wasn’t just looking into the lives of workers who’d long been invisible to me; I was seeing a Canada I didn’t recognize. The more I learned the migrants’ stories, the more I learned our own. And the portrait of Canada I started to see wasn’t flattering.

In awards news:

In good publicity news:

  • Marcello Di Cintio, author of Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers was featured in several outlets this week:
    • Interview in the Calgary Herald: “What started off being a book about other people, about these workers, really also became at the same time a book about us, a book about how Canada has treated these people . . . I feel I’ve written an unpatriotic book in a very patriotic time.”
    • Op-ed in the Globe and Mail: “For a half century, TFWs have recounted stories of filthy and crowded bunkhouses, unsafe working conditions, wage theft, humiliation, physical and sexual assault, and all manner of cruelty. I heard many of these stories first-hand. Penalties for these crimes are too soft and too rare. Victims have little recourse.”
  • Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong was reviewed in Heavy Feather Review: “Brilliantly oscillates between a focus on the inner world of a flawed woman’s personal journey through the land of modern romance and a spitting commentary on what it even means to be a wife, mother, and woman in the 21st century.”
  • Best Canadian Poetry 2026 edited by Mary Dalton was reviewed in the Washington Review of Books: “Reading Dalton, one really gets the sense that there was a poetic process enacting the selection process . . . I thank [Molly] Peacock for bringing the series to life, and [Anita] Lahey and Biblioasis for keeping it alive.”
  • Self Care by Russell Smith was reviewed in That Shakespearean Review: “You can always count on Russell Smith for a straightforward technique that hits you in the solar plexus.”
  • We’re Somewhere Else Now by Robyn Sarah was reviewed in The Tribune: “This collection grapples with contemporary life in a way that is both stylized and vulnerable . . . Sarah’s ability to tie scenes of everyday life to highly abstract concepts and ideas results in compelling poems.”

CROSSES IN THE SKY shortlisted for the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize!

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We’re thrilled to share that on September 25, 2025, the shortlist for the 2025 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize was announced, and included Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia by Mark Bourrie! View the full shortlist and announcement on their website here.

The winner of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, valued at $12,000, will be announced on October 14.

The J.W. Dafoe Prize memorializes Canadian editor John Wesley Dafoe, and is one of the richest book awards for exceptional non-fiction about Canada, Canadians, and the nation in international affairs.

A huge congratulations to Mark from all of us at Biblioasis.

Grab a copy of the book here!

ABOUT CROSSES IN THE SKY

From the bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Esprit-Radisson

This is the story of the collision of two worlds. In the early 1600s, the Jesuits—the Catholic Church’s most ferocious warriors for Christ—tried to create their own nation on the Great Lakes and turn the Huron (Wendat) Confederacy into a model Jesuit state. At the centre of their campaign was missionary Jean de Brébeuf, a mystic who sought to die a martyr’s death. He lived among a proud people who valued kindness and rights for all, especially women. In the end, Huronia was destroyed. Brébeuf became a Catholic saint, and the Jesuit’s “martyrdom” became one of the founding myths of Canada.

In this first secular biography of Brébeuf, historian Mark Bourrie, bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, recounts the missionary’s fascinating life and tells the tragic story of the remarkable people he lived among. Drawing on the letters and documents of the time—including Brébeuf’s accounts of his bizarre spirituality—and modern studies of the Jesuits, Bourrie shows how Huron leaders tried to navigate this new world and the people struggled to cope as their nation came apart. Riveting, clearly told, and deeply researched, Crosses in the Sky is an essential addition to—and expansion of—Canadian history.

ABOUT MARK BOURRIE

Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, and Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre.

The Bibliophile: In Memoriam: Elaine Dewar (1948–2025)

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On the Death of a Happy Warrior for the Public Good

I was walking into work the last week of August when Elaine Dewar called. She had just got back from holidays at a cottage with her daughters and grandchildren. I was waiting on the last round of edits for her new book, Growing Up Oblivious. But she was calling with much more dire news. She’d developed a pain on vacation, thought it might be gallstones or appendicitis, so went to emergency to get it checked out. They’d done a scan and it was cancer. There was no word on the origin or the extent of it yet, but she’d asked to see the ultrasound and had spent far too much time over her life as a science researcher looking at medical records not to know that it was almost certainly terminal. She hoped she’d have six months. She wanted to talk about the book. I demurred, said we didn’t need to now, that she had other things to worry about. But Elaine wasn’t having any of it. “Of course I’m going to worry about it, honey,” she told me gently. “It’s my last book, and it’s with you. So what are we going to do about this?” And with that, we got to work.

Elaine Dewar. Credit: Danielle Dewar.

When Sam Hiyate wrote to me in early December 2015 with a proposal for Elaine Dewar’s book The Handover, about the sale of Canadian publisher McClelland and Stewart to Random House in contravention of Canada’s cultural protection laws, I knew little about Elaine’s work or reputation. Nor was this book, a work of deeply-researched nonfiction, our usual fare at the time; Biblioasis was much more strictly a literary enterprise in those years, borne forward by the ignorant hubris necessary to lay claim to such a designation. How else to continue in a world, even a small, purportedly literary enclave of the same, which cares so little about what we do? Our list in 2015—it strikes me now, at a time that one year pushes into another with almost no distinction, that 2015 was our break-out as a publisher, with three Giller nominations, a Writers’ Trust shortlisting, and a GG win, among other accolades: perhaps we wouldn’t have been sent Elaine’s proposal if that hadn’t been the case—was almost exclusively fiction, poetry, and works in translation; our only experience with nonfiction was literary criticism, with a sideline of regional history and more commercial titles to try and pay the bills. Reading Elaine’s proposal, I was worried that we didn’t have the publishing chops to pull it off. I knew that we didn’t have the money to properly fund its writing: I don’t think we’d ever paid an advance of more than a couple thousand dollars at that point. But we thought Elaine’s was an important story, so I pushed my envelope and offered $4000, which seemed a big risk for a press consistently skirting insolvency, and was able to swing her an additional $3500 in Writer’s Reserve funding. And for that Elaine produced what Jack Stoddart justifiably claimed to be “the single most important book about Canadian publishing . . . published in fifty years.” It garnered her a Governor General’s Award nomination and reams of press coverage, and resulted in a range of important conversations among anyone who cared about publishing or culture in Canada. It’s probably no surprise to those who knew her that it garnered Biblioasis’s first serious threat of a lawsuit, by a former Minister of Culture who had signed off on the sale of M&S, though when they learned that Elaine had dug up government documents that showed exactly what Elaine had claimed, this person (& their lawyer) thankfully never again darkened my inbox.

Elaine’s office and desk, with the research for Growing Up Oblivious lined up chapter by chapter.

Because that was the thing about Elaine: she always had the receipts. There were times earlier in our working history that I doubted her claims, but I quickly learned that she always had the proof somewhere in a manila file folder on one of the multiple desks in her sprawling basement office; there was always a footnote. She taught me to read those footnotes with care as I read her manuscripts. She was a meticulous researcher, with a tenacity I’ve yet to see in another. Though she described herself, earlier this week, as being as “spiritual as an old sock,” she nevertheless believed her role as a journalist involved a sacred trust: to follow the facts as far as they would take her; to pursue the truth at all costs; to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. She did all three with regularity until the end.

Elaine, during our numerous editorial exchanges, offered me a first-rate education in how to edit and publish researched nonfiction, perhaps to the chagrin of those authors who’ve followed her. The key was to “never to be afraid to look stupid”; to clarify and keep pushing when you’re not clear on something; to keep asking questions until you’re satisfied. To fight over every word, every footnote, as the need arises. And we did, it seemed, fight over everything. Those initial Handover editorial rounds were bruising, unlike anything I’d experienced before as a publisher and editor. But as hard as it was, she never took it personally, as she trusted that we had her own, and her book’s, best interest in sight. She trusted in the process.

Poster for the Fourth Annual National Magazine Awards.

And in the process, she helped to reshape the direction of the press. Having been through the fire with Elaine, we knew better how to do these kinds of books, and knew, from her research, that one of the primary consequences of the sale of Canadian publishing to foreign interests was the decline in researched nonfiction. There was a gap in the market that needed to be filled, but more importantly a gap of intellectual responsibility. She fervently believed, despite her noted concerns about Canadian nationalism, that Canadians should be in charge of which Canadian stories were told. And that it would take Canadian writers and publishers to hold the powerful within Canadian society accountable. Elaine felt an intense sense of duty to tell the truth, and hated, as she called them, lying liars who lied. She used her formidable intelligence and research skills to untangle those lies, and we’re all better for it, and as another journalist wrote to me this week, now far lesser for her loss.

Elaine’s writing desk, with more chapters of Growing Up Oblivious.

What drove her was her indomitable curiosity about just about everything. She loved to know things, and grew infuriated when the standard account didn’t make sense. This curiosity led her to begin digging into the origins of COVID when we were all in lockdown, reading the scientific papers, and discovering right away that there were things that didn’t add up; it led her to uncover connections between Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory and the labs at the centre of the COVID outbreak in Wuhan, and gather evidence of the Chinese government’s infiltration of this lab that would have national political ramifications thereafter. What amazes me about the research that became her On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years is that, though it was perhaps the first serious book-length enquiry into the origins of COVID in the English language (quite a feat, I must say, for a provincial publisher!), it has stood up remarkably well, with the consensus opinion moving closer and closer to Elaine’s own over the ensuing years. She followed the facts where they took her, and as usual, she ended up pretty close to the mark.

The Handover and On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years by Elaine Dewar.

Her last book started with a January 1st, 2022 email from psychologist and Native Studies professor Roland Chrisjohn asking her to investigate “‘the cover-up’ of the Canadian government’s ‘genocide’ of Indigenous people.” But in her research, she became pre-occupied by questions of what was known when, by whom; and how she, growing up in the prairies, hadn’t known about the plight of Indigenous people in the surrounding communities. She turned her sharp journalistic eye on herself, and in the process wrote a kind of journalist’s autobiography and an investigation into the mechanics of what she calls obliviousness. The book is also an investigation of Indigenous health, segregated hospitals, and how the government used the lure of health care to conduct unethical experiments on wide swaths of the Indigenous population. There are some very disturbing revelations that Elaine uncovered by doing what she did best: following the trails of footnotes to uncover what had up to now largely escaped notice. Growing Up Oblivious will be published at some point in early 2026; it may well be her most important book.

Poster from the Eleventh Annual National Magazine Awards.

When it became obvious that we didn’t have months but weeks, and then, really, days, I went up to Toronto to spend Monday and Tuesday with her in the Palliative Care Unit at Bridgepoint to work on the final edits and the conclusion. She was surrounded by family and friends who’d flown in from around the world to be with her. Though her body had completely failed by this time, and she was self-administering her pain medication as we spoke, she remained as sharp, funny, and caring as ever. We worked on a round of final edits and questions until she needed a rest; then did a second round; she did a long, wide-ranging audio interview with Marci McDonald about the book and what she uncovered, and was brilliant at it despite everything; then she shifted gears again, devoted to the attentions of her daughters and friends who were waiting for her. The next day she did another long interview with a national radio program and then we worked on the last paragraphs of her conclusion, arguing over word choices as if we had all the time in the world. She never, she told me, liked the word decency: it was a weasel word, could mean whatever you wanted it to mean. We needed something more specific to the issue at hand. We went back and forth for a while, and then it hit me. Dignity? “Yup. That’s it. Now let’s cut the rest of the fat and get it done.” And so we did.

There was so much love in that room, so much laughter, so much dignity, that it dispelled death’s shadow. It was a pleasure and honour to be there among her loved ones, if only for a little while. She seemed able to keep everything in those final days in perfect balance, the professional alongside the personal. Though perhaps, for her, that distinction wasn’t as sharp as it was for others. It didn’t seem possible that, when I took my leave, she’d be gone in less than 48 hours. And though I spent this morning watching her funeral, I still can’t quite believe she’s gone.

Family photos of a young Elaine Dewar.

Elaine once described herself as aspiring “to be a happy warrior for the public good.” She was that. She was fierce, and tough as nails. But she was also a warm, beautiful person, matriarch to what I’ve learned is an incredible family, and a very good friend. She was, always, inspiring, and never more than in the last days; she approached her fate with resolve. I still haven’t entirely processed these last, intense few weeks, those days alongside her and her family and friends at Bridgeport, but I’m grateful once more for the gift of her time, intelligence, care, and compassion, and we will all at Biblioasis try to live up to the example she set.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

In good publicity news: