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Japanese and Canadian Writers in Conversation
Friday, October 26, 2012 6:30pm
Location: The Japan Foundation, Toronto
Address: 131 Bloor St. W., 2nd Floor Admission is free RSVP required: http://www.jftor.org/whatson/rsvp.php or 416-966-1600 x104 Now in its second year, this event will again bring together two pairs of renowned Japanese and Canadian writers in conversation. Featured is a dialogue between novelists Hiromi Kawakami and Pasha Malla, contrasted and complimented by a second dialogue between poets Hiromi Ito and Roo Borson. Motoyuki Shibata and Ted Goossen, co-editors of the Japanese literary magazine, Monkey Business, will moderate. Authors’ Bios:
Ted Goossenteaches Japanese literature and film at York University. He is the co-editor of Monkey Business International, the general editor of The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories, and has published translations of works by Haruki Murakami, Hiromi Kawakami, Yukio Mishima and Yoko Ogawa among others.
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Roo Borson grew up in California and has lived in Canada since the mid-seventies. She is the author of ten collections of solo poetry and one book of essays, as well as co-author of three collaborative works. Her work has been awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Governor General's Award, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, among other honours. Her most recent book, Rain;
road; an open boat, was published this past spring by McClelland and Stewart/Random House. A new collaborative work of prose poetry, Box
Kite, co-written with Kim Maltman under the pen name Baziju, is close to completion. She lives in Toronto with poet and particle physicist Kim Maltman.
Hiromi Ito, born in 1955 in Tokyo, is one of the most important and dynamic poets of contemporary Japan. After her sensational debut in the late 1970s, she emerged as the foremost voice of the wave of “women’s poetry” that swept Japan in the 1980s. To date, she has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed collections of poetry, several novels, and numerous books of essays. She has won many important Japanese literary prizes, including the Takami Jun Prize, the Hagiwara Sakutaro Prize, and the Izumi Shikibu Prize. She now lives outside of San Diego with her partner Harold Cohen and her daughters. Killing
Kanoko is her first book-length collection of poetry in English. 
Hiromi Kawakami (b. 1958) is one of Japan's leading novelists today, a master
of sometimes surreal yet always psychologically acute prose. She is the recipient
of numerous literary prizes including the Akutagawa Prize in 1996, and has
been serving as a judge for that prize since 2007. English translations of
her work include the novels Manazuru (2010) and The Briefcase (2012), both
by Counterpoint, and numerous short stories in Monkey Business, March
Was Made of Yarn, etc.
Pasha Malla’s first collection of short stories, The
Withdrawal Method, was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers' Prize and won both the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Trillium Book Award. A frequent contributor to The Walrus, Globe and Mail and CBC Radio, he is also the winner of an Arthur Ellis Award for Crime Fiction, two National Magazine Awards for humour writing and has twice had stories included in the Journey Prize Stories. Malla's novel People
Park explores the variety of characters that make up an island community plunged into a series of unnatural disasters.