Media Release
For immediate
release
Monday, July 04,
2005
Top non-fiction writers speak out on the personal and the political at The Banff Centre
Cultural Journalism Conversations
July 11 Rosemary Sullivan
July 18 Deirdre Bair
July 25 Richard Rodriguez
August 1 Ronald Wright
8 p.m., Rolston Recital Hall, The Banff Centre, Free
In June 1940, after the French government signed an armistice agreement with Germany’s Third Reich, the French agreed to turn over all German citizens wanted by the Nazis. A group of French and German artists and intellectuals – including Marc Chagall, Andre Gide, Max Ernst, and Henri Matisse – and the American and French nationals who had pledged to help them, fled to a villa outside Marseilles to await U.S. visas. On July 11, author Rosemary Sullivan begins The Banff Centre’s popular Cultural Journalism Conversations series with a talk on this episode in history, and how a talented biographer can enliven a historical and political event through the intimate details of the participants’ lives.
Chair of the Creative Non-Fiction and Cultural Journalism program at the Centre, Sullivan is an acclaimed poet and winner of the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction for Shadow Maker, her biography of Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwan. She has written ten books, including biographies of Margaret Atwood and Elizabeth Smart, and every summer invites three other top non-fiction writers to Banff to mentor young cultural writers and participate in the Conversations series of public talks.
On July 18, the series continues with a talk by Deirdre Bair, author of two bestselling biographies – Samuel Beckett: A Biography (winner of the National Book Award) and Jung: A Biography. In Banff, Bair will speak about the research process on Jung, including investigations into Swiss and German archives, interviews in several languages, and the necessity for a biographer to take cultural differences into account in order to present a subject’s life without bias or subjectivity.
On July 25, popular American essayist and broadcaster Richard Rodriguez will discuss the personal essay as a means to investigating political and cultural issues. A regular contributor to Harper’s Magazine and “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS, Rodriguez has applied his own personal experience to issues including affirmative action, the Canadian-Mexican dialectic, the politics of race in America, the immigrant experience, and the conflict between Protestant America and Catholic Mexico.
Bestselling Canadian historian, novelist, and essayist Ronald Wright wraps up the series on August 1 with Imagining the Worst – examining how our anxiety about the present shapes our imaginings about a dystopian future. The author of a series of non-fiction works about ancient civilizations, including Time Among the Maya and Stolen Continents, last year Wright’s CBC Massey Lectures, A Short History of Progress, were collected in a bestselling book of the same name.
Cultural Journalism Conversations will be presented in the Rolston Recital Hall at The Banff Centre. Tickets for the Banff Summer Arts Festival are available at The Banff Centre Box Office at 1-800-413-8368 or (403) 762-6301 or at box_office@banffcentre.ca .
For high resolution, downloadable photos of Rosemary Sullivan, Deirdre Bair, Richard Rodriguez, and Ronald Wright: http://www.banffcentre.ca/media_room/images/bsaf_2005/#literary
For more information on the Banff Summer Arts Festival: http://www.banffcentre.ca/bsaf/
Media Contact
Jill Sawyer
Media and Communications Officer, The Banff Centre
403.762.6475
