Catch these Magabala authors across various sessions at the 2026 Toronto International Festival of Authors.

Bebe Oliver 

Sintering: Performances and Readings

Wednesday, October 28 7:30PM-8:30PM

Victoria College Chapel
91 Charles St W, Toronto, ON M5S 2C7

Evelyn Araluen, Quill Christie-Peters, Alicia Elliott, Jasmin McGaughey, Bebe Oliver, Kirli Saunders, Nardi Simpson, and Jesse Wente

“Sintering is bonding; it is building coalitions with your neighbours.” — Theory of Water: Nishaabe Maps to the Times Ahead by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

From poetry, to fiction, to nonfiction, to everything outside of and in-between, this evening’s event is a celebration of the encompassing, expansive, and uncontained way we know Indigenous excellence, globally and locally, to exist. Join Indigenous artists from the stolen lands of Canada and Australia – Quill Christie-Peters, Kirli Saunders, Nardi Simpson, Bebe Oliver, Jesse Wente, Alicia Elliott, and Jasmin McGoughey– for a night of readings and performance. Each of the featured storytellers hold love and joy together as a testimony to their unique cultural knowledges and thought systems, and this event will celebrate the ways in which they have come together to share their art. Hosted by the Festival of Indigenous Stories co-curators Evelyn Araluen.

All Times: Indigenous Futurity through Story

Saturday, October 31 5:30PM-6:30PM

Northrop Frye Hall, Room 003

Alicia Elliott, Jasmin McGaughey, and Bebe Oliver

Indigenous writers’ works are often defined in ways different to how they themselves would define them. Dreamed worlds are considered speculative, ghosts are called horror, creation stories and deities are deemed mythology. But what if these imagined worlds have already happened, or are in the process of happening? What if a ghost in a story isn’t horror at all, but normative, just a relative visiting? Why do Indigenous ontologies become relegated to a fiction of myth? Indigenous writing often defies easy categorization and challenges dominant colonial ideologies that enforce binaries onto what is real and what is speculative, on what is past, present, and future, imagining worlds that exist at all times, at once.

Join Mohawk writer Alicia Elliott and Torres Strait Islander, African American author, Jasmin McGoughey, and Bardi Jawi award-winning author, poet and illustrator Bebe Oliver as they discuss their works, dreaming worlds, and what Indigenous futurity means to them. 

Yearning as the Antidote to Despair

Sunday, November 1 1PM-2PM

Emmanuel College Chapel, Room 319

Quill Christie-Peters, Alicia Elliott, Bebe Oliver, and Evelyn Araluen

What might it mean to build movements from a place of yearning? What forms of action become possible when we privilege stories of desire, connection, freedom, culture and joy over the stories of damage told about, but never for our communities?

Bringing together four Indigenous writers from the stolen lands of Canada and Australia, this panel explores yearning as a creative and political force. Against narratives that define Indigenous lives through loss and harm, the panel takes up Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck’s practice of research by desire: asking us to attend to what people want, imagine, make and move towards. This conversation will consider writing and artmaking as acts of connection, sustained by language, culture, community and possibility, exploring how desire might become a form of urgency, resistance and collective movement.

The panel’s ripples extend across generations, geographies and forms: from cultural reclamation and radical joy to queerness, intimacy and the transformative possibilities of creative practice. Through conversation and readings from their work, the writers will explore the ways yearning can unsettle inherited narratives and open pathways towards other futures.

Featuring poet Bebe Oliver, writer and editor Alicia Elliott, and writer Quill Christie-Peters the panel is facilitated by Bundjalung and Wiradjuri poet Evelyn Araluen.

Together, they ask: What do we become when we create space for yearning?

Kirli Saunders

Sintering: Performances and Readings

Wednesday, October 28 7:30PM-8:30PM

Victoria College Chapel
91 Charles St W, Toronto, ON M5S 2C7

Evelyn Araluen, Quill Christie-Peters, Alicia Elliott, Jasmin McGaughey, Bebe Oliver, Kirli Saunders, Nardi Simpson, and Jesse Wente

“Sintering is bonding; it is building coalitions with your neighbours.” — Theory of Water: Nishaabe Maps to the Times Ahead by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

From poetry, to fiction, to nonfiction, to everything outside of and in-between, this evening’s event is a celebration of the encompassing, expansive, and uncontained way we know Indigenous excellence, globally and locally, to exist. Join Indigenous artists from the stolen lands of Canada and Australia – Quill Christie-Peters, Kirli Saunders, Nardi Simpson, Bebe Oliver, Jesse Wente, Alicia Elliott, and Jasmin McGoughey– for a night of readings and performance. Each of the featured storytellers hold love and joy together as a testimony to their unique cultural knowledges and thought systems, and this event will celebrate the ways in which they have come together to share their art. Hosted by the Festival of Indigenous Stories co-curators Evelyn Araluen.

Stories in Motion: Indigenous Forms, Genres and Possibilities

Thursday, October 29 7:00PM-8:00PM

Emmanuel College Chapel, Room 319

Quill Christie-Peters, Nardi Simpson, and Kirli Saunders

Across generations and geographies, Indigenous peoples have always communicated stories, knowledge, memory, law, dreams and relationships through an extraordinary range of forms and technologies. Alongside immemorial traditions of song, dance, weaving and inscription that embody systems of relation to land, ancestors, community and the more-than-human world, Indigenous storytellers have inherited another set of stories: the colonial narratives and literary forms that have sought to categorise, contain and define Indigenous existence. Across the world, Indigenous practitioners are transforming, refusing and remaking these forms anew.

In this conversation, Indigenous artists from the stolen lands of Canada and Australia explore formal hybridity as a creative and cultural practice. How do Indigenous innovations across genre, medium, mode and narrative, expanding the possibilities of Indigenous storytelling, and shift those forms? What happens to poetry when it becomes song? To literature when it moves into performance? To narrative when it refuses the boundaries between text, image, sound, body and place?

Through discussion, readings and live performance, Anishinaabe educator and artist Quill Christie-Peters, Yuwaalaraay musician and writer Nardi Simpson, and Gunai poet and singer-songwriter Kirli Saunders will explore the forms their practices inhabit, unsettle and invent.

Moderated by Ininiw iskwew, Norway House Cree Nation interdisciplinary practitioner Megan Scribe, this is a conversation about storytelling as movement: between mediums, generations, lands and worlds, and about what becomes possible when the story itself creates the form it needs.

Imagining Resistance Beyond Colonies

Friday, October 30 6:30PM-7:30PM

Emmanuel College Chapel, Room 319

Quill Christie-Peters, Nardi Simpson, Jesse Wente, and Kirli Saunders

Across generations, Indigenous voices have carried language, memory, and connection to culture despite ongoing colonial violence. Today’s writers continue and reshape that work anew.

Through poetry, fiction, memoir, and experimental forms, these authors challenge dominant narratives and question the limits of “the master’s tools”. What does it mean to tell stories that refuse those tools, or remake them entirely? How do writers honour inheritance while imagining new futures?

Join Anishinaabe writer and artist Quill Christie-Peters, Yuwaalaraay storyteller, composer and singer/song-writer Nardi Simpson, and Anishinaabe writer Jesse Wente for a rich discussion of craft, sovereignty, and new creative horizons as the panel explores how contemporary Indigenous writing engages with grief, survival, and cultural continuity. Hear about the new modes of storytelling emerging as political work to push beyond convention, inviting readers to think differently about voice, form, and power. Moderated by award-winning Gunai writer and artist Kirli Saunders.

 

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