Jen Sookfong Lee and Sasha Colby, ‘Write Local/Think National’

This event is the first in the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing / Simon Fraser University Graduate Liberal Studies Jim Babcock Lecture Series in Writing, which will take place in Michaelmas 2024.

In this in-conversation event, Jen Sookfong Lee and Sasha Colby will discuss what it means to combine research and imagination in writing Vancouver, particularly through Jen’s Chinatown trilogy (The End of East, The Better Mother, The Conjoined). They will also consider the place of local writing within the broader context of writing and publishing in Canada.

Jen Sookfong Lee was born and raised in Vancouver’s East Side, and she now lives with her son in North Burnaby. Her books include Superfan, named a Best Book of 2023 by the Globe and Mail and Apple Books, The Conjoined, nominated for International Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, The Shadow List, and Finding Home. Jen acquires and edits for ECW Press and co-hosts the literary podcast Can’t Lit.

Sasha Colby is the Director of SFU’s Graduate Liberal Studies program. Her SSHRC-funded projects include Stratified Modernism, a study on literature and archaeology, Staging Modernist Lives, on dramatizing research with three original plays, and the Independent Publishing Book Awards gold medal award winner/ Taste Canada 2024 culinary narrative shortlisted, The Matryoshka Memoirs, a research-based intergenerational kitchen memoir on the legacies of WWII.

This event is free and open to all.

To join the event, click ‘Join the Zoom Meeting Here’.