39. THE HISTORICAL FICTION HIGH TEA
In-Person Feature Event
The annual Sunday brunch is back! Don your Sunday best, assemble your fascinator, grab your friends, and join us for a delightful high tea with three incredible historical fiction writers. This history-making special-tea event includes fun trivia with incredible prizes. Limited availability. Be sure to reserve tickets by Sunday, April 30.
Date: May 7, 2023
Time: 12:00pm – 1:30pm ET
Location: The Rose Theatre in Brampton, ON
This is a specialty event with a ticket price of $25 CAD. It is not included with a festival pass.
The 2023 festival will run from April 30 – May 7. Dedicated virtual programming on our innovative, online platform will run April 30 – May 3, while in-person events — many of which will also be live-streamed and available on-demand for virtual audiences — will run May 4-7.
A Virtual Festival Pass gives guests access to more than 20 virtual events which can be viewed from the website or through our festival app designed for mobile devices. In addition to festival events, virtual passes provide users with direct access to more than a dozen vendors in our festival exhibitor hall. Guests who purchase a virtual pass can also participate in trivia times, roundtable discussions and our new festival after-parties, which will follow all of our evening events.
An In-Person Festival Pass gives users access to all of our virtual events as well as our standard in-person events in Brampton, Ontario on Saturday, May 6.
This year, the festival includes three in-person Specialty Events – the Dine N’ Draw on May 4, the Literary Cabaret on May 5 and our Historical Fiction High Tea on May 7. Tickets for these events are not covered with our passes and are only available until April 30.
On a Budget? Check out our Patron Pass program.
Janika Oza is the author of the novel A History Of Burning, forthcoming from McClelland & Stewart in May 2023. She is the winner of the 2022 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction, and the 2020 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Award, and her stories and essays have appeared in publications such as The Best Small Fictions 2019 Anthology, Catapult, The Adroit Journal, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She lives in Toronto.
Suzette Mayr is the author of six novels including her most recent, The Sleeping Car Porter, winner of the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Award. Her other novels have won the ReLit Award and City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize, and been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book in the Canada-Caribbean Region, the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Best First Book and Best Novel Awards, and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction. Mayr teaches Creative Writing at the University of Calgary.
Sheila Murray’s 2022 debut novel, Finding Edward, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and was a longlisted nominee for Canada Reads 2023. It was listed in the Globe and Mail’s 100 best books, CBC’s best fiction, 49th Shelf’s best books and the Toronto Star’s books gift guide. Her short fiction has appeared in many Canadian literary journals. Sheila has worked as a documentary filmmaker and television sound editor. She moved to the non-profit sector in 2009, and leads a grassroots, volunteer-driven initiative that engages urban residents in adapting to local climate change impacts.
Jael Richardson is the author of Gutter Child, The Hockey Jersey, Because You Are, The Stone Thrower, and the founder and Executive Director of the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) in Brampton, Ontario. Gutter Child was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award and was a finalist for the Forest of Reading White Pine Award. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and lives in Brampton, Ontario.