Eight of the most captivating literary voices of the moment!
Online reservations from May 16.
Festival Accès Asie invites you on a journey through words during a French and English bilingual literary evening, where eight artists share their writing, often unpublished, in multiple genres. Hosted by Kama La Mackerel and curated by Nayla Naoufal, this evening is an opportunity to discover different imaginations and celebrate the plurality of these artists’ literary expressions!
Kama La Mackerel (they/them) is a Mauritian-Canadian multilingual writer, visual artist, performer, educator and literary translator who believes in love, justice and self and collective empowerment. Their practice blurs the lines between traditional artistic disciplines to create hybrid aesthetic spaces from which decolonial and queer/trans vocabularies can emerge. With wholehearted engagement in ocean narratives, island sovereignty, transgender poetics and queer/trans spiritual histories, their body of work challenges colonial notions of time and space as these relate to history, power, language, subject formation and the body.
Sayaka Araniva-Yanez (all pronouns) is a multidisciplinary Latinx artist, originally from El Salvador and based in Tio’tia:ke / Montreal. Sayaka works as a bookseller-comanager of L’Euguélionne and explores various writing subjects: algorithms, talismans, journeys to the afterlife, carnivals. Several of their texts were published in magazines and in collectives. Their digital works have been exhibited internationally. Their first book, Je regarde de la porno quand je suis triste, was published by Triptyque in 2024.
Baharan Baniahmadi (she/her) is an Iranian writer and actress based in Montreal since 2018. She studied theatre at the Art University of Tehran, and art and philosophy at Université Paris 8. Baniahmadi published a memoir and short stories in Iran. She makes her English language debut with the publication in the spring of 2022 of her allegorical novel Prophetess (awarded the prizes 2023 Nouvel Apport Metropolis Bleu/Conseil des arts de Montréal 2023 and 2022 Quebec Writers’ Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction) She attempts to belong to her new country, Canada and to get to know the people beyond languages and cultural differences. In 2023 she was one of the readers of CBC short story prize.
H Felix Chau Bradley (they/them) is a writer living in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). They are the author of Personal Attention Roleplay, a short story collection that was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Kobo Rakuten Emerging Writer Prize in 2022. Their writing has appeared in carte blanche, ESPACE, Humber Literary Review, Maisonneuve, PRISM International, Xtra, and elsewhere. They are an editor at Metonymy Press, This Magazine and Le Sigh.
Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch (them/them) is a writer living in Tio’tia:ke. Their work has appeared in The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 anthology, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. Their book, knot body, published by Metatron Press in 2020, was shortlisted for the QWF Concordia First Book Award, and their second book, The Good Arabs, published by Metonymy Press in 2021, was granted the honorary mention for poetry by the Arab American Book Awards and won the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. Their translation of Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay’s La fille d’elle-même from the French was published in spring 2023. With co-editor Samia Marshy, they are editing El Ghourabaa, an anthology of queer and trans writing by Arab and Arabophone writers, forthcoming Spring 2024. They are also an acquisitions editor at Metonymy Press.
Egyptian-Québécois artist Nour Symon’s lyrical (they), noisy and intimate proposals are driven by a desire to revalue the complexity of interactions between their identities – queer, migratory, in love with the noise of the world. Their approach is driven by a desire to bring together visual arts, concert music and poetry. Their poetry collection L’amour des oiseaux moches (Noroît, 2020) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and the Prix Émile-Nelligan. Nour has also been artistic and musical director of numerous personal and collaborative projects since 2008.
Brintha Koneshachandra (she/her) is an Eelam Tamil- French author and illustrator. She co-founded the publishing house Diverses Syllables and is known for her poem Brinda, enfant du jardin de Krishna published in Il y a des joies dont on ignore l’existence (Diverses Syllabes). She also contributed to Rupture.s from le collectif des Tisseuses published by Ritt Editions and in the magazine Soeurs. Her illustrations can be found on book covers or in magazines (Éditions du remue-ménage, À Bâbord, This Magazine, HER Magazine, Larousse). She created the cover of the collective publication Pissed, pestes puissantes edited by Sana Mansouri, of which she is particularly proud. Her artistic practice highlights the lived experiences and symbolic world of Eelam Tamil women and diaspora. She has collaborated with Tamil political organizations and was awarded the “30 Tamil Women Under 30” prize by the Tamil Canadian Center for Civic Action in 2022. Brintha also has a theater practice within Les Tisseuses collectif and works as a project manager in the field of equity, diversity and inclusion. Her heart belongs to the oceans. She is passionate about art and cooking.
Coralie Plante (she/her) is currently completing a master’s degree in research-creation in the Literary studies program at UQAM, and is a part-time dance teacher and performer. Through the arts – but especially through words – she enjoys questioning the identities, the in-between, the margins and the origins of adopted people. She was published in the NYX magazine, and took part in the collective publication Il y a des joies dont on ignore l’existence, published in 2022 by Diverses Syllabes.