TORONTO, WE ARE BACK SEPT 20-21
The Silk Road Literary Festival is a two-day celebration of literature, art, and ideas from North America’s leading Muslim and BIPOC voices. This year, it will bring together writers, artists, and thinkers to explore storytelling as a vessel of memory, cultural celebration, transformation, and most importantly - The Stories That Make Us.
AN ICONIC STAGE, FOR AN ICONIC WEEKEND.
We’re thrilled to open the doors of St.Lawrence Centre For The Arts, one of Toronto’s most beloved cultural landmarks for this year’s Silk Road Literary Festival.
Address
27 Front St E, Toronto, ON M5E 1B4
Featured Authors
This year’s Silk Road Literary Festival brings together a powerful lineup of voices from across the globe — storytellers, poets, and thinkers whose work bridges cultures and sparks conversation. Explore our featured authors below, with more exciting names to be announced soon.
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Waubgeshig Rice is an author and journalist from Wasauksing First Nation on Georgian Bay. His first short story collection, Midnight Sweatlodge, was inspired by his experiences growing up in an Anishinaabe community, and won an Independent Publishers Book Award in 2012. His debut novel, Legacy, followed in 2014. Moon of the Crusted Snow, his breakthrough novel, was published in 2018 and became a national bestseller. It received widespread critical acclaim, including the Evergreen Award in 2019. The sequel, Moon of the Turning Leaves, arrived in late 2023. His books have been translated into French and German, and his short stories and essays have been published in numerous anthologies.
His journalism experience began in 1996 as an exchange student in northern Germany, writing articles about being an Anishinaabe youth in a foreign country for newspapers back in Canada. He graduated from the journalism program at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2002. He spent most of his journalism career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a video journalist, web writer, producer, and radio host. In 2014, he received the Anishinabek Nation’s Debwewin Citation for excellence in First Nation Storytelling. His final role with CBC was host of Up North, the afternoon radio program for northern Ontario. He left daily journalism in 2020 to focus on his literary career.
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Sadiya Ansari is a Pakistani Canadian author and award-winning journalist based in London. Sadiya's work — including essays, features and investigations — has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Irish Times, the Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, the Walrus, and more. Her debut book, In Exile: Rupture, Reunion and My Grandmother’s Secret Life, was an instant national bestseller.
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Dr. Tammy Gaber is Director and Full Professor at the McEwen School of Architecture, Laurentian University, which she joined as Founding Faculty in 2013. Dr.Gaber has won won several federally funded grants, and has published extensively and taught in architecture programs for the past two decades. Dr. Gaber’s research and book, Beyond the Divide: A Century of Canadian Mosque Design (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2022) was profiled in the Globe and Mail and various journals, periodicals and television. In 2019, Dr. Gaber won the Women Who Inspire Award from the Canadian Council of Muslim Women and in 2020 she was awarded Laurentian University’s Teaching Excellence Award for a Full-time professor and in 2025 won the university’s Research Excellence Award.
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Haroon Siddiqui is Editorial Page Editor Emeritus of the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper, and Senior Fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto. He is a former Distinguished Visiting Professor, Toronto Metropolitan University. He covered or supervised coverage of Canada for 48 years under nine prime ministers. And reported from nearly 50 countries, especially South Asia, West Asia, and the Middle East. He’s the recipient of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honour; Canadian Journalism Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award; the National Press Club’s UNESCO Award; four citations of the National Newspaper Awards; and honourary doctorates from York University and Toronto Metropolitan University.He was the first Muslim, first brown, first South Asian and the first Indo-Canadian to hold the senior journalistic positions that he did – managing editor of the Brandon Sun in Manitoba; and News Editor, National Editor, Editorial Page Editor, and Columnist for the Toronto Star.
Siddiqui is a former president of PEN Canada and a member of the board of PEN International, the writers’ free speech group with 145 chapters in 101 countries. He has also served on the boards of Canadian Managing Editors Conference, Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Advertising Standards Canada, and the Ontario Press Council.
He's the author of My Name is Not Harry: A Memoir (2024), Being Muslim (2008), a post-9/11 travelogue; and editor of An English Anthology of Modern Urdu Poetry (1998).
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Saeed Teebi is a writer and lawyer based in Toronto. His debut collection of short stories, Her First Palestinian, published in 2022, was a finalist for numerous awards, including the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Prize and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Award. His next book will be a work of non-fiction titled You Will Not Kill Our Imagination, examining how being Palestinian entails a fundamental assault on the imagination, and how writers and artists can be at the forefront of overcoming it. He is also working on a debut novel.
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Kagiso Lesego Molope is a novelist and playwright of the San people of Southern Africa. She is the author of four award-winning novels plus a play about Maya Angelou’s life, titled Maya Angelou: Black Wiman Rising. Throughout Southern Africa and in parts of Europe, her work is part of the school curriculum. In the spring of 2024 she was removed from a gala hosted by the Writwrs Trust for speaking of genocide in Gaza. Her forthcoming novel: We Inherit The Fire, will be published by McLelland and Stewart.
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Uzma Jalaluddin is the author of four bestselling novels, most recently MUCH ADO ABOUT NADA (2023), which the New York Times described as, “in a word, brilliant.” Her debut novel, AYESHA AT LAST (2019) was a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2019 and is in development for film in Canada. Her second novel, HANA KHAN CARRIES ON (2021) was named a Best Romance Novel by the Washington Post and is currently in development for a feature film by Amazon Studios and Mindy Kaling. Her first play, THE RISHTA - a family farce about arranged marriage - debuted in Spring 2023 at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre, commissioned by the Silk Road Institute. A popular and prolific public speaker, Uzma has spoken to high school students, university lectures, and participated in book clubs, library events, and literary festivals around the world, in addition to many radio, podcast and television interviews with NPR, Good Morning America, and the CBC. She currently lives in the GTA with her husband and two teenage sons, where she teaches high school.
THE STAGE COMES ALIVE AFTER SUNDOWN
This year’s festival features a dynamic lineup of performers who bring stories to life through sound, movement, and laughter. Whether you come for the music, or stay for the atmosphere, our live shows are a celebration of community!
Tara Moneka + Band
Musician
Hassan Phills
Comedian
SILK ROAD LITERARY FESTIVAL '25 ITINERARY
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SILK ROAD LITERARY FESTIVAL '25 ITINERARY —
From thought-provoking panels and author talks to live performances and communal moments — our full schedule is almost here. Stay tuned!
