Project Bookmark Canada Unveiling: Elizabeth Hay's Garbo Laughs

Tuesday, October 26, 2010 - 1:00pm

West side of Bronson Place (near Fulton) at Colonel By Drive
South Side of the Canal, just East of the Bronson Street Bridge.
Ottawa, ON

Project Bookmark Canada is a national initiative to create a network of tributes to site-specific literature across Canada. Today, Ottawa will mark its place in Canada's literary landscape when a plaque bearing a portion of Elizabeth Hay's Garbo Laughs is unveiled in Old Ottawa South.

The plaque (or Bookmark) is part of a national initiative called Project Bookmark Canada that marks the real places that serve as settings for poetry and fiction. The Garbo Laughs Bookmark is the fifth installation in the series, which began in April 2009, and the first Bookmark in Ottawa.

Writer Elizabeth Hay has lived and written in Ottawa since 1992, when she moved to the city with her husband and children. Hay says she is very pleased to have her work celebrated through Project Bookmark Canada. “These wonderful Bookmarks breathe life into the places that breathe life into books,” says Hay. “You're walking along the street and suddenly it acquires an extra, imaginative layer when you see on a plaque the scene it inspired in a book. It's such a clever way of waking us up to where we live, and at the same time making books visible and permanent.”

In 2007 Hay won the Scotiabank Giller Award for Late Nights on Air, a novel set in Yellowknife. Hay received the Ottawa Book Award for her second novel, Garbo Laughs. The book is set in the neighbourhood of Ottawa South during the time of the 1998 ice storm, and was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2003.

For more information, please see http://projectbookmarkcanada.ca/news/old-ottawa-south-celebrated-nationa...