news | Monday October 14, 2013

A Collaborative Affair: Wigrum Launch in Montreal

Last Thursday, October 10th, Daniel Canty and translator Oana Avasilichioaei launched their new novel Wigrum to a packed house of about 50 people at the Drawn & Quarterly Librairie in Montreal. As CultMTL, a Montreal arts and culture blog, wrote last week, “ Wigrum is a surrealist inventory with the dreamy traces of a Borges or Calvino.”


From left: Robichaud, Lopez, Daudelin, Avasilichioaei, and Canty in discussion.

After Canty’s lively and touching reading, the collaborative team behind Wigrum, including Canty, Ayasilichioaei, illustrator Estella Lopez Solis, and graphic designer Raphael Daudelin of Studio FEED were featured in conversation with Lemon Hound’s Reviews Editor Genevieve Robichaud.

The event was a not only a success with regard to attendance, sales, and good spirits (thanks, D&Q, for supplying the wine!), it also gave four collaborators the opportunity to reflect on the experience of producing a book with creative control over every stage of its development: from writing to translation to illustration to design, Wigrum is a contained body of work conscious of its own laboured journey into the intersecting worlds of literature, art, and artifact.