You don’t usually hear “start-up” and “50th anniversary” in the same sentence — but that’s exactly how Roland Gulliver sees this year’s Toronto International Festival of Authors. In his view, ‘TIFA is a 50-year-old start-up.’”
You see…Gulliver isn’t one for resting on laurels. Since arriving from Edinburgh in 2020 to become TIFA’s first non-Canadian director, he’s guided the country’s oldest literary festival through pandemic pivots, programming overhauls, and now its biggest move yet: leaving its long-time home at Harbourfront Centre for Victoria University at the University of Toronto. This fall for the first time, TIFA will unfold entirely in its new campus setting — and with it, a reimagined model for how literary festivals reach readers today.
“I am very excited about the opportunities that this change offers!” Gulliver enthuses. “TIFA has had an incredible 50 years at Harbourfront, but the past few years have required all arts organisations to really focus on what they need to do to be successful, support their artistic community, and reach their audiences. TIFA has achieved — and learned — a lot in the last 12 months, transitioning to becoming fully independent. This has been made possible by the incredible support of our Board, funders and donors, along with a lot of hard work from the team.”
With that independence has come the new venue, and a new ethos. “Victoria University’s enthusiasm to become a partner has been very inspiring,” he observes. “And I think it is the synergies that we can build – with the University’s communities to engage their staff (some of Canada’s best writers) and their students (passionate readers and enthusiastic audiences) to create exciting, dynamic, challenging conversations and creative content – that will make TIFA a standout cultural event.”
5 days of new connections, voices, languages
This year’s festival runs until November 2, in a newly condensed five-day format that is designed to go deep, rather than wide. But even within this tighter structure, the scope remains ambitious: authors from Brazil to Korea, France to Japan, and from across Canada’s many regions will be featured in a program that embraces fiction, nonfiction, poetry, genre, translation, hybrid formats and more.
“It is no coincidence that we have both ‘Toronto’ and ‘International’ in our name. How we bring and celebrate the two is at the heart of what we do,” notes Gulliver. That means “bringing international authors to the city’s readers, or taking Toronto’s writers to a global audience. In addition, the city’s diversity, the many languages spoken, the stories, and the histories offer a very special opportunity for TIFA to create new connections and build new audiences by bringing voices, languages and experiences to our stages.”
He’s particularly energized about increasing multilingual presence and the possibilities of translation — and several festival events respond directly to that ambition. One such program features Argentina’s Michel Nieva and Korea’s Jinwoo Park in a conversation that challenges colonial language politics and reclaims speculative storytelling through fresh cultural lenses. These are the kinds of moments Gulliver sees as TIFA’s future: global in scope, but grounded in critical, contemporary relevance.
And he points proudly to another standout on this year’s slate: the Writers’ Collective of Canada’s workshop series, which is a set of intimate, community-driven writing experiences that invite not just listening, but doing. These hands-on sessions are core to Gulliver’s belief that festivals must be spaces of creation as well as consumption.
Meeting readers where they are
Gulliver’s tenure has helped him to re-shape TIFA’s signature event, and also to pivot the organization more broadly. “When I became Director of TIFA, I was excited by the possibility of one 11-day festival with lots of events covering a broad range of genres and themes. But I have learned this is a very difficult sell; and only having one event in the calendar meant that we were often missing a lot of our audience. People are busy, dealing with a lot of competing demands for their time – especially in culture and entertainment.”
What’s the answer? “By creating more genre–focused festivals and experiences, and more opportunities to engage throughout the year, we hope to open out access to our festivals, and the books and authors in them.” The success of TIFA’s genre-specific spin-offs, like the now well-established MOTIVE crime and mystery mini-festival in June, bears out the shift. And given the way many reader communities now operate outside traditional formats, TIFA has a tantalizing opportunity to meet those readers where they are.
“The changes in digital consumption and social media highlight that there is an audience out there who are passionate readers, excited to discover brilliant new books,” Gulliver notes. “The Romance genre is a great example, showing how communities of writers and readers can share their reading passions.” And this “shows that TIFA’s challenge is how to reach and engage with them in new ways that make our festivals and events accessible.”
Lighting the darkness with unexpected discoveries
Gulliver recognizes that TIFA faces this challenge at a dark moment in human history. “2025 has been a tough year, with the world changing and with many of us struggling to understand what to do. For me, bringing authors together from around the world, to share their stories with readers and audiences is the best way to find a way to navigate these times. Time and time again, we find humanity in books.”
He points to a specific TIFA event on November 1 that speaks directly to that conviction: a conversation between Ibtisam Azem and Samrat Upadhyay, two authors whose work grapples with displacement and fractured identity. “Ibtisam’s poetic, slim novel The Book of Disappearance imagines an Israel where the Palestinians have spontaneously vanished; Samrat’s novel, DarkMotherland, is a 700-page sprawling novel of love and political violence in a dystopian reimagining of Nepal. Both speak to the bigger picture of what is happening in the world; both introduce us to characters who we fall in love with.”
That event, Vanishing Worlds, Fractured Homelands, also serves as a powerful example of the kind of global-local programming that Gulliver champions — and of the unexpected discoveries he hopes audiences will make. “I think what excites me the most about the festival isn’t one thing, but the many things you can experience,” he offers: “The fact you might come for one reason — perhaps one of our headliners Kiran Desai, Andre Aciman, Richard Armitage, or Chris Pavone — but discover something new like Michel Nieva, Jinwoo Park, Michael Bennett, Sybill Grimbert. Or you are there for the Canadian fiction — Ian Williams, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Michael Redhill — but discover Canadian non-fiction with Susan Swan, Andrew Coyne and David Shribman. Maybe you come for the yoga & journaling, but then sign up for the creative writing masterclasses or the Writers Collective of Canada workshops.”
Ultimately, “It is all about unexpected discoveries and reading journeys.” And in that spirit, Gulliver’s TIFA 2025 isn’t a reboot — it’s an inspired, impactful revision that sharpens the festival’s long-running story by honouring its roots and speaking boldly to what comes next.
The complete festival schedule and tickets are available at festivalofauthors.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
