Sheila Heti in Conversation with Lee Henderson

Please join Munro’s Books in celebrating the launch of Sheila Heti’s latest book, Alphabetical Diaries. Sheila will be in conversation with UVic writing professor, Lee Henderson.

Munro’s Books is pleased to present two Canadian award-winning authors, Sheila Heti and Lee Henderson, in conversation at their store on Tuesday, February 20th at 7:00 p.m. Sheila Heti will read from her new book Alphabetical Diaries and then chat about it with local fiction writer and UVic creative writing professor, Lee Henderson. The evening will end with a Q&A with audience members and a book signing with Sheila Heti. This event is free to attend.

A little over a decade ago, Sheila Heti—the award-winning author of a string of modern classics including How Should a Person Be?, Motherhood, and Pure Colour—began looking back at the diaries she’d kept over the previous ten years, searching for signs of deeper change inside herself. She loaded all 500,000 words of her journals into Microsoft Excel, to order the sentences alphabetically and seek out patterns and repetitions. How many times had she written, “I hate him,” for example? With the sentences untethered from the narrative of her diaries, she started to see herself—and the Self—in a new way: as something quite solid, anchored by shockingly few characteristic preoccupations. Returning to the project over the years, something more universal and novelistic emerged. Alphabetical Diaries is the sublime and probing result—one that rises to the heights of artistry and insight for which Heti is rightfully acclaimed.

Sheila Heti is one of our greatest literary innovators and has been pushing boundaries with her work since the age of 24, when she published her first book, the short-story collection, The Middle Stories, in 2001. She’s since won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature, and has been shortlisted for the Giller Prize and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Heti’s fiction and criticism have appeared in the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Granta.

WHEN: Tuesday, February 20th at 7:00 p.m. (doors at 6:30).

WHERE: In-store at Munro’s Books, 1108 Government St.

WHAT: A reading by Sheila Heti from her latest book, followed by a conversation with Lee Henderson and a Q&A with the audience.

HOW: This event is free to attend.