Le Salon du livre du Grand Sudbury (SLGS) upcoming biannual book fair and literary festival welcomes anyone interested in literature and performing arts.
"It's not just for francophones but the entire community," said Geneviève LeBlanc, the general manager of SLGS.
Hosted in-person for the first time since 2018, LeBlanc said the event will host up to 60 authors from across Canada and highlight Francophone, First Nation's, Black and LGBTQ2S+ work.
Tomson Highway, a renowned Cree author and playwright whose work has been published in French, English and Cree, is one of the festival's guests of honour. Highway will be presenting his cabaret Songs in the Key of Cree accompanied by Peruvian Canadian singer Patrice Cano and saxophonist Marcus Ali on May 6. Other guests of honour are Edem Awumey, a Togolese-Canadian writer and winner of the Governor General’s Award and Chloé LaDuchesse, Sudbury’s 5th poet laureate who will be celebrating the publication of her first mystery novel.
The festival, which combines the pleasures of a literary festival with those of a commercial book fair, includes interviews and panels with authors, literary lunches, round table discussions and evening stage performances and dives into a wide range of topics including the war in Ukraine, First Nations reconciliation, immigration issues and the environment.
LeBlanc added that lighter topics and activities geared toward children like comic books artists and workshops in local schools by children's authors will also be available, and May 7 is family day at the festival.
"There's something for everybody," she said.
The event, which is expected to attract thousands of visitors, will take place at the Place des Arts from May 5 to May 8.
Although the festival is returning to its traditional in-person format, there will still be some virtual events that the public can watch on the SLGS website or social media. This includes a reading of the second generation of Sudbury urban tales, Les Contes sudburois. The reading will take the main stage at the Place des Arts and will be filmed and rebroadcasted at the Forum Avantage numérique, an annual conference on the development of the northern technological and virtual ecosystem, held in Rouyn-Noranda during the same weekend.
There is an entrance fee of $5, but LeBlanc said a sliding scale for those who may not have the means to pay for the event will be available.
"People should come, even if they're not big readers, they'll learn a lot and have access to thousands of books that might interest them," she said.
To find out more information about the festival visit the SLGS website.