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Carmen Aguirre

Carmen Aguirre is a Vancouver-based theatre artist who has worked extensively in North and South America. She has written and co-written twenty-one plays, including Chile Con Carne, The Trigger, The Refugee Hotel, and Blue Box. Her first non-fiction book, Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter, was published in 2011 by Douglas & McIntyre in Canada and Granta/Portobello in the United Kingdom and is now available in Finland and Holland, in translation. Something Fierce was nominated for British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the international Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, was a finalist for the 2012 BC Book Prize, was selected by the Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, and the National Post as one of the best books of 2011, was named Book of the Week by BBC Radio in the United Kingdom, won CBC Canada Reads 2012, and is a number-one national bestseller. Aguirre has more than sixty film, TV, and stage acting credits, is a Theatre of the Oppressed workshop facilitator, and an instructor in the acting department at Vancouver Film School. She received the Union of B.C. Performers 2011 Lorena Gale Woman of Distinction Award, the 2012 Langara College Outstanding Alumnae Award, and has been nominated for the Jessie Richardson Theatre Award, the Dora Mavor Moore Award, and the prestigious Siminovitch Prize. Aguirre is a graduate of Studio 58.

March 2013 : Carmen Aguirre Dishes Up Chile Con Carne!

February 2013 : The Regina Monologue

February 2013 : Freedom to Read Week and Carmen Aguirre!

February 2013 : Carmen Aguirre Talks Chile Con Carne

January 2013 : Carmen Aguirre Visits Octopus Books!

January 2013 : Carmen Aguirre Serves Up Chile Con Carne in Toronto

January 2013 : Theatre in Ottawa: A look at Carmen Aguirre's Blue Box

January 2013 : Meet Brian Quirt and Carmen Aguirre!

November 2012 : Something Fierce at North Vancouver City Library

October 2012 : 2012 De Colores Festival of New Works!

September 2012 : Aguirre, Fischman, and Morse are at the Eden Mills Writers' Festival

March 2012 : Shortlists for 2012 B.C. Book Prizes Announced!

February 2012 : Carmen Aguirre on Being Called a Terrorist

February 2012 : Something Fierce Wins Canada Reads!

February 2012 : Canada Reads 2012: Something Fierce by Carmen Aguirre Trailer

January 2012 : Promo Video for Carmen Aguirre's Blue Box

November 2011 : Carmen Aguirre Tours Blue Box in 2012

September 2011 : Word on the Street Vancouver, 2011

June 2011 : Carmen Aguirre at the Toronto Women's Bookstore

May 2011 : Carmen Aguirre on Studio 4 with Fanny Kiefer, Part 1

September 2010 : Mapping the Rainy City on a Sunday

September 2010 : Making the Refugee Hotel

September 2010 : Carmen Aguirre Tells a Local Tale at Vancouver Word on the Street

BOOK AWARDS

Playwrights’ Theatre Centre Best New Play Award

BOOK AWARDS

Finalist for the 2005 Jessie Richardson Award for Innovation Award (Touchstone Theatre)

QUOTES OF NOTE

“The play pivots on the fascinating contradictory impulsesin this one person:the selfishness of sexual passion versus the selflessness of passionate revolutionary commitment. A good storyteller, Aguirre runs the full gamut of emotion.”
– Vancouver Province

“There’s a clear, sophisticated intelligence at work here. The script is riddled with both serious and ironic political references.”
– Georgia Straight

QUOTES OF NOTE

“A humorous and heartbreaking look at life in exile.”
— Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles

QUOTES OF NOTE

“ The Trigger is a knockout … intelligent, powerful, funny, horrific, theatrically stunning, and utterly free of victimology.”
— Jerry Wasserman

“The writing is at its most revealing when Aguirre shows us how­ the young Carmen’s mind struggles to process adult-scale horror…Going into an evening like this, you might expect sentimentalization of pain or oversimplification of politics … what The Trigger offers is so strange that it has the ring of truth, and it is never simplistic. Often, though, it is beautiful.”
— Colin Thomas, Georgia Straight