Christiane Vadnais (Canada)

Christiane Vadnais holds a Master’s in Creative Writing from Laval University (Québec, Canada). She writes fiction and works in the literary world as an event programmer and producer of innovative reading experiences. She has published one novel and several short stories and collaborates on numerous transdisciplinary projects. Her literary work has been translated into six languages and she has won several awards.

Since 2017 she has been writing ecofiction mainly exploring possible futures. Her debut book, “Faunes” (“Fauna”, English translation published in 2020 by Coach House Books) is a constellation of dreamlike stories where the boundaries between humanity and animality blur until new balances are established. From 2020 to 2022, she took part in the creation of a vast collective utopia, “L’île inventée” (“The Invented Island”): in the form of a book, a museum exhibition and a podcast presented in Québec and France, this project imagines the construction of a society of humans and plants on a small island in the South Atlantic, during an alternative 19th century. Vadnais herself characterises her creative work as follows: “Navigating between science fiction, magic realism and poetic writing about the intimate and the body, her work seeks to lift literature out of anthropocentrism and question the existence of living beings in an era of upheaval.” 

Christiane Vadnais is currently a writer-in-residence at Tartu UNESCO City of Literature and during her stay she plans to work on her second novel, get engaged in the local literary scene, and strengthen the ties between Tartu and Quebec as two sister Cities of Literature in the UNESCO Creative Cities Network.