The New Quarterly to launch theme issue about Montreal...in Montreal

The spunky literary quarterly The New Quarterly of Waterloo, Ontario ventures out of province to launch its latest issue. It will be at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival on May 1 to promote its themed Montreal issue which contains many writers from in and around that city.

Blue Metropolis , celebrating its 10th year, is bringing together over 230 writers and 14,000 participants for readings, workshops, interviews and panel discussions.

TNQ, which has in the past devoted an entire issue to Newfoundland writers and one on sports, has now turned its attention to Montreal. Guest editor Katia Grubisic says:

The Montréal issue of The New Quarterly... has already lined up new work by many of Canada’s prominent and promising writers, in both French and English, as well as translation from some of the other solitudes that make up our cultural landscape—likely contributors, several of whom have been published in The New Quarterly before, include award-winning authors such as the poet Stephanie Bolster, , the novelist Rawi Hage, the essayist David Solway, the rising-star short story-writer Daniel Canty…

The issue aims to introduce The New Quarterly’s readership to current Montréal creative writers. As well as strengthening and establishing linguistic and geographical boundaries among The New Quarterly’s writers and readership, the Montréal issue is straddling the boundaries of genre: photographer Terence Byrnes writes the literary subjects of his portraits into closer conversation, and poet Robyn Sarah investigates and interweaves the contiguous lives of Hungarian-Canadian sculptor and functional-object artist Tibor Timar and photographer D.R. Cowles, who now share studio space in Montréal’s Mile End."

UPDATE: a complete list of contributors in the issue can be found on the magazine's website.