Burmese Lessons: A Love Story

KAREN CONNELLY – BURMESE LESSONS: A LOVE STORY

What’s the freedom to read and write worth to you? In Burmese Lessons: A Love Story (Random House Canada), award-winning author Karen Connelly dramatically recounts how she began to approach this well-worn academic quandary as a deeply personal issue while living on the contested Thai-Burmese border during the late 1990s. To celebrate the release of her memoir, Connelly will perform passages against a visual backdrop. Marc Glassman, Executive Director of This is not A Reading Series, will host the evening.

– A This Is Not A Reading Series event presented by the Force for Cultural Events Production, Random House Canada, Gladstone Hotel, NOW Magazine and Take Five On CIUT.

Burmese Lessons is a love story. Unlike conventional love stories, this one takes the reader into a world as dangerous and heartbreaking as it is enchanting.When Karen Connelly finds herself in Burma in the late 1990s, she is immersed in a world of students staging mass demonstrations in opposition to Burma’s dictators, revolutionaries fighting an armed insurgency against that same military regime, and refugees living in hellish limbo in Thailand. Connelly first comes to love a wounded, remarkably beautiful country, then a gifted man who has given his life to its struggle for political change. Burmese Lessonsis illuminated by the sensual language and flashes of humour that have won her fans around the world.“[Karen Connelly] shows us what autobiography usually veils: the human spirit not at its most defiant and brave, but as it really is and can only be.”— The New York Times

Karen Connelly is the author of nine books of non-fiction, fiction and poetry, the most recent being The Lizard Cage, which the New York Times Book Review compared to the works of Solzhenitsyn, Mandela and Orwell. Raised in Calgary, Connelly has lived for extended periods of time in different parts of Asia and Europe and now has two homes, one in Toronto and one in Greece.

CONTACTS:

Karen Connelly: Scott Sellers, ssellers@randomhouse.com

This Is Not A Reading Series: Chris Reed, coordinator@tinars.ca