The Rare Machines Tour

Join us at Wooden Sticks for a mind-blowing round-table discussion with five extraordinary authors.

Curious, courageous, and forward-thinking, Dundurn Press’s Rare Machines imprint has been making a name for itself with numerous award nominations and accolades as well as rave reviews from readers around the world. Tonight we invite you to celebrate the third anniversary of Rare Machines with a once-in-a-lifetime gathering of five of the shining stars of the imprint, hosted and moderated by Rare Machine’s acquiring editor Russell Smith. 

Your $55 ticket includes dessert and coffee and a $25 voucher to redeem towards your book purchase that evening.

VICTORIA HETHERINGTON

NATHAN WHITLOCK

JOWITA BYDLOWSKA

JIM BARTLEY

BABAK LAKGHOMI

Interviewed by RUSSELL SMITH

Victoria Hetherington worked as a butcher and an artist’s model before graduating to writing just about anything you can imagine for money. Their debut novel, Mooncalves, was a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award 2020. Victoria lives in Toronto.

Nathan Whitlock is the author of the novels A Week of This and Congratulations On Everything. His work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, Best Canadian Essays, and elsewhere. He lives with his family in Hamilton, Ontario.

Jowita Bydlowska was born in Warsaw, Poland, and moved to Canada as a teenager. She has published two bestselling books: the memoir Drunk Mom and a novel, Guy, as well as dozens of short stories in various magazines and journals. Jowita lives in Toronto.

Jim Bartley was a playwright before he took to prose. His first two novels were set mainly in Balkan war zones. The Bliss House breaks the mould, riffing on Jim’s powerful love of rural and wild landscapes. He lives in Toronto and Dufferin County, Ontario.

Babak Lakghomi is the author of Floating Notes. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, NOON, Ninth Letter, New York Tyrant, and Green Mountains Review, and has been translated into Italian and Farsi. Babak was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and writes in Toronto.

Russell Smith was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and grew up in Halifax, Canada. He studied French literature at Queen’s, the University of Poitiers and at the University of Paris (III). He lives in Toronto.

Since 1989 he has been a freelance journalist and cultural commentator, publishing in Details, The New York Review of Books, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Toronto Life, NOW, Flare, Toro, Sharp and many other journals. For 20 years he wrote a regular weekly column on the arts for the national Globe and Mail. He frequently appears on radio and television as an analyst of artistic and social trends.

An expert on language, he was the host of the popular CBC Radio One program “And Sometimes Y”, about words, language, for two seasons.

His fiction is largely contemporary in setting and satirical in tone. It has been nominated for several major awards, including the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, the Rogers/Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (twice), the Trillium Prize, the Chapters/Books In Canada First Novel Award, the City Of Toronto Book Prize, and the Danuta Gleed Award. He has twice won the National Magazine Award for fiction, and his novel Muriella Pent was selected as best fiction of its year by Amazon.ca.