29. The Librarianist

1. The Librarianist 

Patrick deWitt with Mark Sinnett

Reading and Conversation 

Bellevue 

9:30 – 10:30 am 

Join bestselling and award-winning author Patrick deWitt comes for a Sunday morning cup of coffee and a conversation about The Librarianist, an introverted outcast with a love of literature. “Readers come to deWitt for his brand of slightly off-kilter storytelling blessed with exuberant characterizations, gleeful dialogue, and a proprietary blend of darkness and charm, all strung up in lights here.” – Booklist. 

Patrick deWitt 

“DeWitt’s great gift lies in his ability to depict the Everyman in extremis – heroism hidden in plain sight.” —The Daily Telegraph  

Patrick Dewitt is a screenwriter and author, with a bevvy of best-selling novels to his name. Two of his books, French Exit (an international bestseller and a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize), and The Sisters Brothers (winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the Booker Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize), have been adapted into movies. His other books include the critically acclaimed Undermajordomo Minor and Ablutions. 

In his latest work, the Librarianist, we learn the story of Bob Comet, a retired librarian who has lived his life through and for literature, unaware that his own experience is a poignant and affecting narrative in itself. In a starred review, Kirkus said the book “brings to mind John Williams’ Stoner and Thoreau’s chestnut about ‘lives of quiet desperation’… a quietly effective and moving character study.” Another review in the Willamette Week, calls it “an entertaining menagerie of strange characters and numerous apt and evocative phrases.” 

Born in British Columbia, he now resides in Portland, Oregon. 

Mark Sinnett 

Mark Sinnett is a Canadian poet, novelist and short story writer. Originally from England, Mark moved to Canada as a teenager, and eventually made his way to Kingston, where he earned a film degree from Queen’s University. Mark’s first poetry collection The Landing was winner of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. His other titles include the short story collection Bull, the poetry collection Some Late Adventure of The Feelings, and The Border Guards, a thriller novel that was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis award. The Carnivore, his most recent novel, is a narrative of disaster and betrayal, set in the Toronto of 1954 and 2004. The Toronto Star said the novel “weds the pinprick domestic intimacy of Alice Munro with the flop-sweat extra-marital intrigue of James M. Cain.… Sinnett, also an award-winning poet and story writer, has done his homework in preparing for The Carnivore, and he’s executed it with a palpable relish: Toronto circa 1954 is evoked with pungent immediacy.”  

In addition to writing the best real estate copy in the country, Mark is a former Kingston WritersFest board member, and provided his invaluable insight on the program advisory of Kingston WritersFest for several years.