THE ARTS : ‘The Olympics of Literature’ Bring Authors to Toronto

Those who fret that the era of the World Wide Web foreshadows the disappearance of books may take comfort in a recent event: Here on the shores of Lake Ontario, thousands of people, some from halfway around the globe, gathered to read from books, argue about books, evangelize about books and buy books.

This city was aglitter with literati, including some of the biggest names in the book world, for the annual International Festival of Authors. The event, which lasted 11 days, propels thousands of customers through the turnstiles each year and puts Canada’s literary community into the glow of an intercontinental spotlight.

Douglas Fetherling--a Toronto critic, poet and essayist who has been part of the literary scene here for nearly 30 years--called it “the Olympics of literature. It really has all the different classes and categories of literature and all the nationalities, and they’re all thrown together for two weeks at this event.”

This year, 61 authors from 25 countries read from their latest works. They included Margaret Atwood, Ann Beattie, Alan Bennett, Ariel Dorfman, Richard Ford, Thomas Keneally, Joyce Carol Oates, Grace Paley, Mordecai Richler, Mary Lee Settle, Joanna Trollope and Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

The success of the festival, now in its 16th year, springs from the determination of its executive director, Greg Gatenby, as well as Canada’s disproportionate influence in the world of letters, particularly in English-language fiction.

Consider just some of the Canadian talent on bookshelves: Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Timothy Findley, Mavis Gallant, Atwood and Richler.

“If you were to ask critics around the world to name the 50 most important writers of fiction in the English language, probably six to 10 of them would be Canadian. Well, that’s way out of proportion to the population,” Gatenby noted during a morning break in his festival duties.

Exactly why English-speaking Canadians, who number about 21 million, are so well represented and well regarded in the world of fiction remains a bit of a mystery, even to those closest to that world. What’s more, this “explosion of creative talent,” as Gatenby puts it, is a relatively new development, dating mainly from the 1960s.

Some speculate that it stems from Canada’s being at the intersection of what Fetherling calls “three rivers” of literature--Canadian, American and British. There are few books published in the three countries that are difficult to find in a city like Toronto.

But Canadian fiction also has benefited from government subsidies, which are now in jeopardy, thanks to large debt burdens at all levels of government.

The festival itself is largely government funded, as are the weekly readings that Gatenby has organized here since 1974 and which served as the festival’s prototype. The readings, begun at a government-endowed coffeehouse called the Bohemian Embassy, initially were intended to show off Canadian writers. By 1978, Gatenby felt the series called for “a judicious blend of foreign and Canadian voices, as long as a Canadian was doing the choosing.” The first foreign author was American John Cheever.

For many well-known writers, Toronto in the 1970s was an exotic destination. “We’d bring foreign writers here so they could find out it’s not a city of igloos with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy singing in the background,” recalled Gatenby. “I had some authors from European countries ask me if there were telephones in all the hotel rooms.”