A Literary Debut: Exclusive Interview with Toronto Author Elizabeth Wethers on Debut Novel, ‘Words Left Unspoken’

As the Authors at Harbourfront literary series prepares to wrap up for the summer this June, and with the intervening months between it and the Word on the Street book festival in September and the International Festival of Authors (IFOA) in October, it’s a worthy time to note how literary Toronto is.

With the biggest public library system in North America, as well as a proliferation of writers from diverse backgrounds who readily identify as Torontonians and who also often write about the city, it’s not surprising that the atmosphere is always ripe for aspiring writers to get their start.

Elizabeth Wethers is one of such writers. A graduate of the University of Toronto with a degree in History and Political Science, Wethers has recently published her debut novel, Words Left Unspoken on the online book and retail giant, Amazon.com. A looping tale of relationships, fate, and consequences, Wethers’ literary debut places her in good company.

But first, a synopsis of the novel.

Film Review: Akin Omotoso’s ‘Man on Ground’ (2011)

Image courtesy: TalkMedia Nigeria / press release

South Africa is no stranger to the Hollywood treatment, with its tense racial history fuelling such films as Sarafina! (1992) with Whoopi Goldberg, Mrs Mandela (2010) with UK actress Sophie Okonedo, and most recently, this year’s The Bang Bang Club (2011). The latter is a gritty, fact-based, apartheid era film about a group of combat photojournalists documenting the violence of the time, starring Ryan Philippe and Canadian star Taylor Kitsch.

The country has seen its share of cinematic revisions of its history, and the majority of such films are set in the past, either in pre- or just-post-apartheid South Africa, and are often positioned as cautionary tales of what happens when xenophobia and human nature go awry. But the prevailing tone is that those were the bad old days, before Nelson Mandela and the Truth Commission set everything aright.

But Man on Ground (2011), Nigerian director Akin Omotoso’s latest offering which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) 2011, is an eye-opening statement of a chilling fact: racial violence is not just in the past, but in the very real present. That was then, but it is also now.