Summer Social & Book Talk with Kim Echlin
June 11, 2026
Upcoming Event
Date: June 11, 2026
Time: 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm
Where: Alumni Hall, Victoria College, 73 Queen's Park Crescent, Toronto, ON M5S 1K7
Free to attend / open to all
Members, writers, journalists, and friends of PEN – join us for our Annual General Meeting, followed by a summer social for writers, featuring a conversation with Kim Echlin about her new book, Tell Others: Storytelling for a World in Turmoil.
This back-to-back event is in two parts: the AGM portion of this event is only open to members of PEN Canada, while the summer social that follows is open to all writers, friends and members of the public. Both are free to attend, and separate registration is required.
About the Summer Social & Book Talk
In the spirit of community and dialogue, PEN Canada is hosting its first Summer Social, open to all writers and supporters. This is a chance to socialize, eat, drink, and hear from PEN International board member and Canadian novelist, Kim Echlin.
The event will centre on a book discussion for Kim Echlin’s latest book, Tell Others: Storytelling for a World in Turmoil (Penguin Random House Canada, 2026), which is an intimate meditation on the cultural impact of storytelling and testimony. Tell Others explores how literature resists silencing and repression with truth and imagination.
Kim will be interviewed by Ali Sobati, an Iranian poet, translator, literary activist, and member of the PEN Canada Writers in Exile community.
This event is free to attend. Refreshments will be provided, including sandwiches, coffee, tea and sweets. Books will be available for purchase – all proceeds will be donated to PEN Canada and PEN International.
You do not need to be a PEN member to attend this event, and PEN encourages longtime members to invite their friends, students, colleagues and other writers to attend – plus ones are encouraged. Please RSVP to attend the Summer Social.
This social will immediately follow the PEN members-only Annual General Meeting in the same building, which has a separate RSVP.
About the Book
From the internationally bestselling author of The Disappeared comes a profound meditation on the cultural impact of storytelling and testimony in five intimate and illuminating essays.
In this moving collection, critically acclaimed novelist Kim Echlin examines how we turn to literature to measure our lives against the darknesses of our time. Tell Others explores how literature resists silencing and repression with truth and imagination.
Echlin skillfully blends her lived experience in different parts of the world—teaching in post-revolutionary China, researching war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, studying under one of Canada’s most respected Elders, Basil H. Johnston—with wide-ranging reading that offers solace and highlights the possibility to transform outrage into understanding and resistance.
Looking to her favourite writers—Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Ma Jian, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Haruki Murakami, to name a few—Echlin grapples in fresh ways with tyranny, war, sexual violence, and censorship to bear witness to the past and look to the future. Written in characteristically unsparing and evocative prose, Tell Others is an invitation to all readers to acknowledge histories that are difficult to see and to make meaning from the stories that buried bones tell.
Author proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to PEN Canada and PEN International.
About the Author
Kim Echlin is the award-winning author of Elephant Winter, Dagmar’s Daughter, Under the Visible Life, and Speak, Silence, winner of the Toronto Book Award. Her novel The Disappeared won the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award and is published in 20 countries. For her nonfiction writing she has won the CBC Literary Award and the Dalton Camp award. She serves on the board of PEN International.
About the moderator
Ali Sobati is an Iranian poet, translator, and literary activist based in Toronto. With over 20 years of work in Iran’s suppressed literary and academic circles, he has taught modern poetry, philosophy of literature, and critical theory across underground and alternative institutions. He is the co-editor and translator of Hairan: Poems of Hair and Freedom (Scotland Street Press, 2024) and author of the forthcoming poetry collection The Tree of Life: A Fragmented Elegy. Sobati’s work spans Persian and English, engaging with exile, trauma, and resistance. In addition to publishing widely, he has organized poetry collectives, disaster relief campaigns, and educational workshops for at-risk youth in Tehran’s Darvazeh Ghar district. Since arriving in Canada in 2022, he has continued this intersectional literary and social work model through public readings, translations, and cultural programming. His exile is a direct result of his public defiance of Iran’s state censorship and cultural repression.
![icon](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fpencanada.ca%2Fevent%2Fsummer-social-book-talk-with-kim-echlin%2F"e=Summer+Social+%26%23038%3B+Book+Talk+with+Kim+Echlin&picture=https%3A%2F%2Fpencanada.ca%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2026%2F05%2F2026-AGM-Summer-Social-Book-Talk-with-Kim-Echlin-3.png)
Subscribe for updates about PEN Canada’s work to defend free expression.