McGill Conversation | Into the Woods: Children’s Books and Fairy Tales
Join Novelist Jane Urquhart and Alberto Manguel for a trip “into the woods” of Fairyland. East will meet west in this evening celebrating children’s stories from across the globe. Children’s books are among the most inventive productions of the art of printing, and the McGill Library holds a beautiful collection of early children’s literature, as well as hand puppets, folk tales, and marionettes.
Doors open for a light reception at 5 PM.
This event is now full.Â
This event is presented in collaboration with the Friends of the McGill Library.Â
Author Bio
Jane Urquhart is the author of eight internationally acclaimed novels, among them The Whirlpool, which received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger in France; Away, winner of the Trillium Award, The Underpainter, winner of the Governor General’s Award and a finalist for The Orange Prize in the UK, and The Stone Carvers, which was a finalist for The Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and for Britain’s Booker Prize. She is the author of a collection of short fiction, and four books of poetry, and she has also written a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery, and was editor of the most recent Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories. Her work, which is published in many countries, has been translated into numerous foreign languages. Urquhart has received the Marian Engel Award and the Harbourfront Festival Prize. She is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2016 she published A Number of Things; Stories of Canada told through 50 Objects, which was commissioned by publisher HarperCollins to celebrate Canada’s sesquicentennial.
Alberto Manguel is an Argentinian-Canadian writer, translator, editor and critic, born in Buenos Aires in 1948. He has published several novels, and non-fiction, including Packing My Library, Curiosity, With Borges, A History of Reading, The Library at Night and (together with Gianni Guadalupi) The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. He has received numerous international awards, among others the Commander of the Order of Arts & Letters from France, the Formentor Prize and the Alfonso Reyes Prize in 2017, and the Gutenberg Prize 2018. He is doctor honoris causa of the universities of Ottawa and York in Canada, and Liège in Belgium and Anglia Ruskin in Cambridge, UK. Until August of 2018 he was the director of the National Library of Argentina.