 | Thursday, January 27, 2022 | |  | | | | What is the one book all of Canada should read? It's time for Canada Reads 2022.
Over four days, the five champions will bring their diverse perspectives to this year's theme: One Book to Connect Us.
Here are the 2022 champions and the books they chose for the 21st edition of the great Canadian book debate! The Canada Reads debates will take place March 28-31, 2022. | | |  | | | | Ralph Benmergui has lots of life experience. He's had great career success, harrowing medical diagnoses and an abiding love for his family and faith. He writes about his lows, highs and everything in between in the memoir I Thought He Was Dead.
Benmergui's family emigrated from Morocco and came to Toronto when Ralph was a child. In I Thought He Was Dead, Ralph traces his early acting and comedy years, his career as a CBC host and the faith that has always been his North Star.
Benmergui talked to The Next Chapter's Shelagh Rogers about why he wrote I Thought He Was Dead. | | |  | | | | Quiara Alegría Hudes is best known for her collaboration with Lin-Manuel Miranda to create the hugely popular musical (and now feature film) In the Heights. It ran for three years on Broadway — winning four Tony Awards, including best musical, in 2008 — and became an international success.
Now she's come out with a memoir, My Broken Language, which traces her early childhood and her development as an artist, exploring the intersection of language and identity in relation to home.
Hudes spoke with Writers & Company's Eleanor Wachtel about her life and latest work. | | |  | | | | Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm writes powerful fiction and poetry. Akiwenzie-Damm is a member of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation on the Saugeen Peninsula in Ontario.
Her latest book is a collection of poems from throughout her career called (Re)Generation. She spoke about the work with The Next Chapter's Shelagh Rogers at a University of British Columbia event hosted by the novelist Michelle Good.
| | |  | | The Scotiabank Giller Prize has announced the jury for the 2022 prize. The annual $100,000 literary award is the biggest in Canadian fiction.
Canadian author Casey Plett will chair the five-person panel. Joining her are Canadian authors Kaie Kellough and Waubgeshig Rice and American writers Katie Kitamura and Scott Spencer.
The 2022 longlist will be announced in September in St. John's, with the shortlist to follow later in the fall in Toronto. The winner will be announced in November.
Omar El Akkad won the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize for What Strange Paradise. | | | | |  | | | | Charles Demers is a Juno Award-nominated comedian and author from Vancouver. He is also the author of the novels Property Values and Primary Obsessions.
Like many stand-up comedians, Demers has had to sit out the pandemic since live venues have closed. In the meantime, he's been reading — and re-reading — memoirs by some of his favourite comedians.
He spoke with The Next Chapter's Shelagh Rogers about three of his favourite stand-up comedy memoirs: Based on a True Story by Norm Macdonald, Born Standing Up by Steve Martin and Pryor Convictions by Richard Pryor. | | |  | | | | What happens when stories get erased, neglected, forgotten in the making of our collective history? And how can we reclaim the stories of Black experience?
Those are the questions Esi Edugyan explores in her CBC Massey Lectures, Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling. The award-winning Canadian author examines the relationship between art and race through the lens of visual art, literature, film and her own lived experience.
Listen now to the six-part 2021 Massey Lectures on CBC Radio's IDEAS and the CBC Listen App. | | |  | | | | June Hur is a South Korea-born writer based in Toronto. Her work is inspired by her personal journey. She is also the author of The Silence of Bones.
The Red Palace follows Baek-hyeon, a palace nurse whose mentor is wrongly accused of a massacre and teams up with a police inspector to clear her name.
Hur spoke to The Next Chapter about what inspired her YA novel The Red Palace. | | |  | | | | Jack Wang is a N.Y.-based writer and professor originally from Vancouver. He teaches in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College and his short stories have been published in Joyland Magazine, The Humber Literary Review and The New Quarterly.
Wang's debut short story collection, We Two Alone, was on the Canada Reads 2022 longlist. Set over a century and spanning five continents, We Two Alone traces the evolution of the Chinese immigrant experience.
Wang spoke with CBC Books about how he wrote the book. | | |  | | | | The Maid by Nita Prose is the #1 Canadian fiction book this week.
Check out the list of all the books Canadians are buying! | | | Share this newsletter | | or subscribe if this was
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