May 18, 2022 (Toronto, ON): Knopf Canada, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada, announces the launch of an exciting new publishing program Alchemy by Knopf Canada, under the editorial direction of acclaimed poet, novelist and essayist Dionne Brand. With Alchemy, Brand will work in close partnership with Knopf Canada’s Publishing Director Lynn Henry, and with the collaboration and guidance of Publisher Martha Kanya-Forstner, to develop and publish a new line of books.
The mandate of Alchemy by Knopf Canada will be to create books that remake what is literary; books that reimagine genre; books that reposition our thinking about how we know what we know. Fiction and non-fiction, ambitious in style and content, Alchemy books will decenter colonial models of literature and thought. They will speak about our times, about precipitous climate catastrophe, about social and political reckoning. Alchemy will explore the state and stakes of living in the contemporary world and imagine a radical vision of the future.
Alchemy’s publishing program will release two to three carefully chosen titles each year. It will also be anchored in an annual publication, The Alchemy Lectures, a signature event for York University and presented in partnership with Knopf Canada. Spearheaded by the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities, The Alchemy Lectures will bring together three to four distinguished visual and performing artists, researchers, scholars, writers, architects, and makers from Canada and around the world to engage in revelatory conversation about topics of social and political reckoning. The Alchemy Lectures will culminate in the publication of a book, extending the public lecture and building on its alchemical form.
Of the publishing initiative, Dionne Brand says, “I am looking forward to this collaboration/experiment in Alchemy with Lynn Henry and Martha Kanya-Forstner. It’s my sense that how books might intervene in the present world, and what complex thinking is required to meet that world, are two important and urgent questions. And so, for me, this collaboration will foster brilliant writers doing the most brilliant thinking in fiction and non-fiction for the world to come.”
Knopf Canada Publishing Director Lynn Henry adds, “Alchemy began as a casual conversation on a walk with Dionne several years ago. I feel so fortunate to have been able to continue that conversation and to witness how what was sparked back then has, through the alchemy of Dionne’s extraordinary vision, gradually transformed into something both more specific and more expansive. It is this spirit of continual exchange of ideas and experience, and what arises out of reframing and reimagining what we think we know, that gives such life and energy to this project.”
Dionne Brand is a novelist, poet, and essayist who, with her genre-bending explorations of narrative form, honours the complexities of diasporic experience, gracefully bringing to life the fundamental relationship between politics and aesthetics. The third Poet Laureate of Toronto (2009-2012), Brand was born in Guayaguayare, Trinidad and moved to Toronto in 1970. Aesthetically and politically radical, Brand’s work has made her a central figure in both world and Canadian literature, earning her many awards and honors, including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry (1997), the Griffin Poetry Prize (2011), the Toronto Book Award (2006, 2019), the Trillium Book Award (1997, 2019), and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Fiction (2019). Her most recent novel, Theory (2018), reimagined the novel of ideas for our own moment, challenging and enchanting the reader at the same time. Following its publication, Brand was awarded the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. In 2022, she will publish Nomenclature, a volume of new and collected poetry. And in 2023, her nonfiction classic, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, will be published in a new edition celebrating its past twenty years of influence. Brand is the recipient of six honorary doctorates and was poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart (Penguin Random House Canada) from 2014-2021. She was invested as a member of the Order of Canada in 2017.
About Knopf Canada: In 2022, Knopf Canada, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada, celebrates thirty years of publishing great writers and award-winning books. Knopf Canada’s Canadian and international authors include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dionne Brand, David Chariandy, Rawi Hage, Kate Harris, Sheila Heti, Kazuo Ishiguro, Naomi Klein, Helen Knott, Vincent Lam, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Yann Martel, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, Maggie O’Farrell, Eden Robinson, Sally Rooney, Salman Rushdie, Harley Rustad, Shyam Selvadurai, Christina Sharpe, Patti Smith, Douglas Stuart, Madeleine Thien, Miriam Toews, John Vaillant, Joshua Whitehead, Britt Wray, and many more.