Speaker: Neil Besner, English, U of Winnipeg Wednesday Talk: January 14,2026, 2pm-4pm, Faculty Club and Zoom – hybrid
January 14 @ 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Speaker: Neil Besner, English, U of Winnipeg
Title: Montreal Standard Time, 1944-1950: Mavis Gallant’s Short Stories and Her Early Journalism
Abstract: Gallant’s early journalism for The Montreal Standard has not been available in print since 1950 and has rarely been discussed in relation to her well-known career as a writer of some of our finest short stories, over 100 of them first published in The New Yorker. But beginning in the late 1980’s, Gallant herself wrote about how important her journalism was to her developing powers as a writer and to her fiction.
Bio: Neil Besner was born in Montreal and grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He taught Canadian literature and other subjects at the University of Winnipeg from 1987 until his retirement in 2017. He served in several senior administrative roles at UWinnipeg; his last post was as Provost and Vice-President, Academic (2012-17). He writes mainly on Canadian authors and on the poet Elizabeth Bishop, with books on Mavis Gallant (1988), Alice Munro (1990), an edited collection on Carol Shields (1995), and numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews, as well as co-edited books on the short story in English (1991) and on poetry in English (1997). He is fluent in Portuguese; his prize-winning translation from Portuguese into English of a novelized Brazilian biography of Elizabeth Bishop (2002) was the major source for the 2013 Brazilian feature film, Reaching for the Moon. His most recent books are the memoir Fishing With Tardelli: A Memoir of Family in Time Lost (2022) and the co-edited Montreal Standard Time: The Early Journalism of Mavis Gallant (2024, with Marta Dvorák and Bill Richardson). His translation from Portuguese into English of a critical study of Elizabeth Bishop’s work in Brazil is forthcoming (Louisiana State University Press, 2026).
The link to register is https://forms.office.com/r/CQKT5AUSMH
The deadline to register is the Monday before the event at noon. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.
If you have any questions, please contact the organizer, Linda Hutcheon at l.hutcheon@utoronto.ca.
