The newly announced 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award winner is UWinnipeg’s Erín Moure for her English translation of Chantal Neveu’s book This Radiant Life. Moure is UWinnipeg’s inaugural Jake Macdonald Writer-in-Residence.
You can find Moure in conversation with the trilingual European poet, sound/text and installation artist, Caroline Bergvall, this Saturday, November 20 at 2:00 pm CST. This serendipitous opportunity is presented by The Jake MacDonald International Writers’ Panel.
You can register for the conversation on Zoom.
UWinnipeg’s Dr. Sandy Pool (Department of English) who coordinates the residency notes that she is working on developing a series to help broaden the reach of Canadian writers in conversation with other talented writers from across borders and around the world.
“We are using the Jake Macdonald residency to facilitate conversations between international writers and Canadian writers, and sharing their voices with the UWinnipeg community who might not otherwise have access to these talented voices.”
As another part of this residency, Moure consults writers from the community on their own writing, which runs until December 15, 2021. If you are interested you can contact her at e.moure@uwinnipeg.ca.
This program honours the memory of the beloved Manitoba writer Jake MacDonald, who passed away suddenly, earlier this year. Through the creative thinking and great generosity of MacDonald’s family, friends, and peers, this program makes possible the work Jake was committed to that includes mentoring emerging writers, bringing readings and other literary events to the public, and providing support for working writers to concentrate on their projects in process.
About the authors in conversation
Bergvall was born in Hamburg, raised in Switzerland, France, and Norway and is now based in the UK since 1989. She’s also an artist, teacher, performer, facilitator, community collaborator and project dreamer, and editor who brings people together working on text and sound projects across borders and languages, using English using English as a common tongue while disrupting English at the same time.
Her works have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and Dia Art Foundation in New York, at the Tate Modern in London, and at the Musée d’art contemporain d’Anvers, among other places. Multilingual poetics, cultural frontiers, migrancy and belonging, artist and community, feminism, and queer politics and ways of knowing, are among her concerns. Her recent poetic works such as Drift, Meddle English, and hAlisoun Sings explore the history and spaces of the English language, women’s presence, the freedom to speak and move and belong.
Her collaborative poem installations have been created and performed for the Oslo Poetry Festival and others. In Covid times, she’s been running independent workshops to help writers across the world share poetic practices, difficulties, and keep writing in uncertain and precarious times. More details at carolinebergvall.com.
Moure who recently won a 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award, has published over forty books of poetry, essays, memoir, and translations and co-translations from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese into English. Recent works are Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure (Wesleyan, 2017), Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots (New Star, 2017), a translation into Frenglish of the Portuñol of Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea (Nightboat, 2017, finalist for a Best Translated Book award), and a reissue of Furious (Governor General’s Award for poetry 1988, Anansi 2018).
To hear Moure and Bergvall’s conversation, join us on Zoom, Saturday, November 20 at 2:00 pm CST. The event is free but pre-registration is required.
