Ed Talk – Suzette Mayr

As part of the background research for her award-winning novel The Sleeping Car Porter, Suzette Mayr visited numerous archives across Canada and in the United States. The Cranbrook History Centre was a key resource for Mayr as she worked to situate her fictional main character within a non-fiction, historical setting. In this talk, Mayr will discuss the ways in which she incorporated historical research and Cranbrook History Centre artifacts into the novel – using the research as a frame and guide for the work – while also realizing at a certain point that, as Kate Atkinson writes, “sometimes to find the truth at the heart of a book a certain amount of reality falls by the wayside.”

Ed Talks are always free to attend but space is limited so please be sure to register

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About the Author

Suzette Mayr is the author of six novels including her most recent, The Sleeping Car Porter, which won the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Award. Her other novels have won the ReLit Award and City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize, and been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book in the Canada-Caribbean Region, the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Best First Book and Best Novel Awards, and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction. Mayr has also published articles in the peer-reviewed journals Horror Studies, Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature, The Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and in Antipodes. She is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary where she teaches fiction-writing.

Copies of The Sleeping Car Porter can be purchased ahead of the Ed Talk at the Cranbrook History Centre giftshop and Huckleberry Books

The Ed Talk Program is funded by the Community Foundation of the Kootenay Rockies and Cranbrook Rotary.