Tell Others
The talented and accomplished Kim Echlin is launching her fine new nonfiction book Tell Others: Storytelling for a World in Turmoil. Kim visits Edmonton for a reading and interview May 5 & 6. Details linked here.
I invite all my friends and strangers to her book launch and interview. I have long admired Kim’s writing and life. We met in the 1980s in Toronto while we were working on our PhDs and have remained fast friends joined together by our passion for mothering, writing, and social justice.
About Tell Other
Penguin writes:
“From the internationally bestselling author of The Disappeared comes a profound meditation on the cultural impact of storytelling and testimony in five intimate and illuminating essays.
In this moving collection, critically acclaimed novelist Kim Echlin examines how we turn to literature to measure our lives against the darknesses of our time. Tell Others explores how literature resists silencing and repression with truth and imagination.
Echlin skillfully blends her lived experience in different parts of the world—teaching in post-revolutionary China, researching war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, studying under one of Canada’s most respected Elders, Basil H. Johnston—with wide-ranging reading that offers solace and highlights the possibility to transform outrage into understanding and resistance.
Looking to her favourite writers—Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Ma Jian, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Haruki Murakami, to name a few—Echlin grapples in fresh ways with tyranny, war, sexual violence, and censorship to bear witness to the past and look to the future. Written in characteristically unsparing and evocative prose, Tell Others is an invitation to all readers to acknowledge histories that are difficult to see and to make meaning from the stories that buried bones tell.
The author proceeds for this book will be donated to PEN Canada and PEN International.“
Who is Kim?
“Kim Echlin is an award-winning Canadian novelist, translator, editor, and teacher. She lives in Toronto and has lived and worked in Paris, the Marshall Islands and China. For her research, writing and translation, she has visited Europe, Zimbabwe, Malawi, South Africa, Cambodia, Honduras, Pakistan, Bosnia, Egypt, Japan, Korea, and Iceland.
Her early novels, Elephant Winter and Dagmar’s Daughter, are explorations of women’s creativity and language. Her novel The Disappeared was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, won the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, and has been translated into 20 languages. Under the Visible Life was declared “nothing short of a masterpiece” by Quill & Quire. Speak, Silence was nominated for the 2022 Evergreen Award and won the 2021 Toronto Book Award.
In 2024, Kim was elected to the board of PEN International where she will continue to work on freedom of speech.”
Find more information about Kim Echlin’s books on her website here.
Two Events in Edmonton
Tuesday May 5 at 7p Interview @ ArtsHub 10131 97 St
The interview with writer Kim is hosted by Rayanne Haines. This is part of Edmonton’s Litfest and you can buy a ticket for 7p Tuesday May 5 at ArtsHub Creative Studios 10131 97 Street Northwest, Edmonton. You can buy tickets for this event HERE:
Wednesday May 6 at 7p @ Magpie Books
Kim will be reading at Magpie Books. You can find more information HERE:
Praise for Tell Others:
“In Tell Others, Kim Echlin brilliantly analyzes the importance of literature in resisting censorship when voices that dare to question the narrative of those in power are threatened. Timely, insightful, and beautifully written, this book invites us to ask questions and to allow the stories that carry our human experience to rise above dogmatic ideologies that claim to have all the answers.”
—Marina Nemat, internationally bestselling author of Prisoner of Tehran
“A fine Canadian writer’s deep, readable, compassionate and unflinching effort to understand why human beings tell each other stories, even about the most terrible experiences. What Echlin achieves is remarkable, a quiet but stirring affirmation that there is nothing, literally nothing, that human beings cannot find a way to endure and overcome provided that they can find the words and tell their story to someone who will listen.”
—Michael Ignatieff, author of On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times
“I can’t stop thinking about this beautiful book. Tell Others is rooted in great generosity and profound curiosity, addressing three questions essential to our humanity: How can I best listen? How do I speak? and What can I do? I closed this book feeling hopeful that art will rescue us from the shackles of certainty, and help us come to terms with what happened on our watch if we listen, make the unspeakable speakable, and through our actions, create a new story.”
—Shelagh Rogers, Honorary Witness, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and CBC literary host
“In these days of willful deafness, Echlin’s loud and clear voice is a rallying call for vital and enlightening dialogue. This is an absolutely necessary book.”
—Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading
“With clarity, courage and rich compassion, Echlin reflects on authors such as Milan Kundera, Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood, using their works to illuminate the realities of tyranny, war, sexual violence and censorship. Yet rather than leave us in despair, Tell Others carves a path forward toward remembrance, resistance and transformation. It is at once a witness-memoir and a celebration of stories that refuse to stay silent. Echlin’s collection of essays also acts as a bulwark against the ever-widening ideological gaps of our times. It is a call to all of us: to listen, to bear witness, and to speak the truths that cannot be silenced.”
—Samira Mohyeddin, award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and producer
“Censorship, testimony, translation, silencing, and listening—these five words are the beautiful and timely spine of this story. Taking some of the most difficult historical violences of our times as the incitement to read otherwise, Echlin shows the ways in which fiction provides readers a moment of respite. In these pages, the words, language, and stories of others quietly provide us the possibility of community, of refusal, of renewal and of what is possible when we make ourselves available to other accounts of what it means to live a life. We read the writer reading and we share a certain unity through words that produce liberating sensations for collective possibilities beyond despair.”
—Rinaldo Walcott, author of The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom
No Gate No Lock 