Calgary, Ep. 8

October 18, 2024 — After a five year hiatus, Literary Death Match returns to Calgary for the bliss of Wordfest at DJD Dance Centre and got a lineup for the ages! the wild night ended when JD Derbyshire toppled co-finalist Shashi Bhat in a One Star Wonder finale, winning Derbyshire the LDM Calgary, Ep. 8 crown, and literary immortality to boot.

Here's the full lineup from the night-of:

ALL-STAR JUDGES: 

Literary Merit: Heather O’Neill, multi-award winning novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, her most recent novel When We Lost Our Heads, was shortlisted for the Prix des Libraires du Quebec

Performance: Nita Prose, author of The Maid, which has sold over 1 million copies worldwide, and won multiple major awards including the Ned Kelly Award for International Crime Fiction

Intangibles: Alice Kuipers, bestselling, award-winning author of 14 books for kids and young adults, including Life on the Refrigerator Door, 40 Things I Want to Tell You, and the Polly Diamond series

Super-Intangibles: Roddy Doyle, author of 10 acclaimed novels, including the Booker Prize finalist The Van and the Booker Prize-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

ALL-STAR READERS:

Round 1: 
* Shashi Bhat, award-winning author of the all-new Death by a Thousand Cuts, The Most Precious Substance on Earth (finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction), and The Family Took Shape (finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award)

* Alice Winn, screenwriter and award-winning novelist of In Memoriam, the UK’s biggest selling hardback fiction debut of 2023, which won Waterstones' Novel of the Year Prize, and was named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Washington Post and NPR

Round 2:
* JD Derbyshire, comedian, theatre maker, writer, activist and author of the novel Mercy Gene, they're play Certified won two Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards

* Catherine Hernandez, award-winning author of Scarborough, Crosshairs and the novel, The Story of Us, which was shortlisted for the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award and longlisted for a Toronto Book Award

Hosted by LDM creator Adrian Todd Zuniga (author of the award-nominated novel Collision Theory)

Produced by Shelley Youngblut & Rita Sirignano

Where: DJD Dance Centre, 111 12 Ave SE, Calgary (map)