The Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival

The Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, which has apparently been going on for a while now, was just brought to our attention:

The 10th annual edition of the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival will take place April 30–May 4, 2008 at the Delta-Centre-Ville Hotel as over 350 writers, literary translators, cartoonists, storytellers, and publishers from around the world will gather in Montreal for five days of literary events held in English, French, Spanish and other languages.

They have a really great list of authors lined up this year (including one of Open Letter’s!):

Sealtiel Alatriste (Mexico), André Alexis (Canada), Donald Antrim (USA), Anouar Benmalek (Algeria), Geoffrey Brock (USA), Ricardo Castillo (Mexico), Karen Connelly (Canada), Lindsey Davis (UK), Sanja Domazet (Serbia), Sylvie Durbet-Giono (France), Alaa El Aswany (Egypt), Alina Fernandez (USA/Cuba), Anke Feuchtenberger (Germany), Gary Geddes (Canada), Nancy Huston (Canada), Etgar Keret (Israel), Alice Kuipers (Canada), Gilles Lapouge (France), Adam LeBor (UK/Hungary), Alexander Livergant (Russia), Alain Mabanckou (Congo), K. Madavane (India), James Meek (UK), Ameen Merchant (India/Canada), Diane Meur (Belgium), Jacques Neirynck (Switzerland), Josip Novakovich (USA/Croatia), Andrew O’Hagan (Scotland), Glenn Patterson (Northern Ireland), Anna Porter (Canada), Roberto Saviano (Italy), Yu Shi (China), Adriaan van Dis (Netherlands), Padma Viswanathan (Canada), Jorge Volpi (Mexico), Binyavanga Wainaina (Kenya), Ruth R. Wisse (USA), and Dulce Maria Zúñiga (Mexico) and Tang Ying (China).

The full program for the festival should be up sometime today.

And now for the bad news. The Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival takes place April 30 – May 4, which is the exact same weekend as the PEN World Voices Festival in New York. So, we’re going to miss out on it (again) this year, but at least we’re informed.

Now we just have to figure out a way to get them to invite us to the Festival for 2009…