About this Event
This event is free to attend. Refreshments will be provided, including sandwiches, coffee, tea and sweets. Books will be available for purchase – all proceeds will be donated to PEN Canada and PEN International.
In the spirit of community and dialogue, PEN Canada is hosting its first Summer Social, open to all writers and supporters. This is a chance to socialize, eat, drink, and hear from PEN International board member and Canadian novelist, Kim Echlin.
The event will centre on a book discussion for Kim Echlin’s latest book, Tell Others: Storytelling for a World in Turmoil (Penguin Random House Canada, 2026), which is an intimate meditation on the cultural impact of storytelling and testimony. Tell Others explores how literature resists silencing and repression with truth and imagination.
Kim will be interviewed by Ali Sobati, an Iranian poet, translator, literary activist, and member of the PEN Canada Writers in Exile community.
You do not need to be a PEN member to attend this event, and PEN encourages longtime members to invite their friends, students, colleagues and other writers to attend – plus ones are encouraged. Please RSVP on Eventbrite to let us know you are attending the Summer Social.
Please note, this social will immediately follow the PEN Canada Annual General Meeting in the same building, which is open to PEN members only and has a separate RSVP — enquire by email to [email protected].
About the Book
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.
Proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to PEN Canada and PEN International.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Alumni Hall, Victoria College, Toronto, Canada
CAD 0.00
