Event Sponsor: The Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning
“Entirely original and brilliant. Gray weaves together the parallel lives of Sara Roosevelt and Jennie Churchill, as wives as well as mothers, and explores their fascinatingly dissimilar guidance of their famous sons’ futures. Fresh, original, superbly researched, and immensely readable.” – Ronald Cohen
Join us for a very special GivingTuesday fundraising event featuring festival favourites Charlotte Gray and Lawrence Scanlan. In Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons: The Lives of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt, Charlotte presents an impeccably researched and captivating dual biography of two famous women whose sons would change the course of the 20th century. In conversation with Lawrence Scanlan, Charlotte offers intriguing social insights, challenges the perception that Jennie and Sara were lesser figures in the backdrop of history and argues that these two remarkable individuals were key in shaping the characters of the sons who adored them and in preparing them for leadership on the world stage. Leaders are not just born but made.
Charlotte Gray is one of Canada’s best-known writers and the author of twelve acclaimed books of literary nonfiction, including The Promise of Canada. Her bestseller The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master, and the Trial That Shocked a Country won the Toronto Book Award, the Heritage Toronto Book Award, the Canadian Authors Association Lela Common Award for Canadian History, and the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Nonfiction Crime Book. It was shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize, the Ottawa Book Award for Nonfiction, and the Evergreen Award, and it was longlisted for the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Nonfiction. An adaptation of her bestseller Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich in the Klondike was broadcast as a television miniseries. An adjunct research professor in the department of history at Carleton University, Charlotte has received numerous awards, including the Pierre Berton Award for distinguished achievement in popularizing Canadian history. She is a Member of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Lawrence Scanlan is an eclectic and prolific writer whose curiosity often takes him into uncharted territory. A journalist for nearly five decades, he was the literary producer for Peter Gzowski’s Morningside on CBC Radio, literary editor of The Kingston Whig-Standard, and managing editor of Harrowsmith magazine. As a freelancer he has written articles on scores of subjects, including science, sports, literature, travel, and medicine, winning three National Magazine Awards.
He is the author or co-author of more than two dozen books and served as ghost-writer for several Canadian personalities, including Margaret Trudeau, Richard Peddie, Olivia Chow, Robert Bateman and Ian Millar. His subjects are diverse – from the horse-human bond (Wild About Horses, The Horse God Built) to philanthropy (A Year of Living Generously: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Philanthropy), to violence in hockey (Grace Under Fire: The State of Our Sweet and Savage Game). He is currently working on a family memoir entitled Baseball & Bloodlines: Five Brothers, Forty Years, and the Quest for the Perfect Road Trip).
Lawrence lives in Kingston with his partner Ulrike Bender, and they spend as much time as they can at their cabin in Prince Edward County.
Below is a list of Artists and Resources in the database. We have worked hard to collect as many individuals and bands as possible, though we are certainly aware that this list is incomplete. There may be inaccuracies in the collected information. Please contact us if you find anything that needs correcting, or click the + sign at the top right of this page to add People and Resources who are missing from the listings.