Interview - Leslie Shimotakahara and Sisters of the Spruce

Canada Reads American Style

Rebecca welcomes Canadian author Leslie Shimotakahara, whose third novel, Sisters of the Spruce, is on Quill & Quire's "2024 Spring Preview: Fiction" and the 49th Shelf's "Most Anticipated: Our 2024 Spring Fiction Preview." Her memoir, The Reading List, won the Canada-Japan Literary Prize and has been translated into Japanese, and her fiction has been shortlisted for the KM Hunter Artist Award. She has written two other critically acclaimed novels, After the Bloom and Red Oblivion.

Leslie’s writing has appeared in the National Post, World Literature Today, and Changing the Face of Canadian Literature, among other anthologies and periodicals. She completed a PhD in English at Brown University, after which she returned to her hometown of Toronto, where she now resides with her husband.

https://leslieshimotakahara.com/

https://www.instagram.com/leslieshimotakahara/

https://caitlinpress.com/Books/S/Sisters-of-the-Spruce

Highlighted books:

• From Slave Girls to Salvation: Gender, Race, and Victoria's Chinese Rescue Home, 1886-1923 by Shelly D. Ikebuchi
• We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama
• Within the Barbed Wire Fence: A Japanese Man's Account of his Internment in Canada by Takeo Ujo Nakano