The Toronto International Festival of Authors is leaving its long-time home at the Harbourfront Centre complex on Lake Ontario, becoming a financially independent organization that hopes to weave itself more deeply into the city’s fabric.
Festival director Roland Gulliver will announce its spin-out Thursday night at an event celebrating Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at the Isabel Bader Theatre. The venue is part of the University of Toronto’s Victoria University, which will become a key partner for the literary festival, one of Canada’s oldest and biggest.
It has for years shared financial resources and staff with the Harbourfront Centre cultural complex. Independence will allow the festival to extricate itself from its host’s continuing fiscal crisis, which has seen it sharply downsize in recent months.
“The thing that’s special about books and literary events is that they can and should be flexible and dynamic,” said Mr. Gulliver, who has been the festival’s director since 2020. “Although we’re a 50-year-old organization, we’re becoming a startup.”
The Festival of Authors began as a reading series when Harbourfront Centre first opened in 1974, and became a full-fledged literary fest in 1980. It has brought thousands of authors to the city, boasting 22 Nobel laureates among them, and has since expanded to include a dedicated sister festival, Motive, celebrating mystery and crime books.
Both organizations have faced setbacks since the COVID-19 pandemic struck five years ago. The Festival of Authors sometimes struggled to attract audiences to the isolated complex, which is separated from the city by the Gardiner Expressway and is a short hike from the city’s central transit hub. The Harbourfront Centre, meanwhile, faces $106-million in deferred maintenance costs – with Ottawa warning last year that it “does not yet have a sustainable operating foundation.”
The Globe and Mail first reported in November that Harbourfront was undergoing a major restructuring, forcing it to cut a quarter of staff, end its lease on the renowned Fleck Dance Theatre, and pull back support for its arts subsidiaries the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and Festival of Authors. This included no longer sharing staff to help with some back-office business lines.
The festival becomes independent on April 1 and will seek new venues across the city. Partnering with U of T’s nearby Victoria University will give it an anchor close to the Toronto Public Library’s flagship Reference Library as well as Koerner Hall, which has hosted special events for the Festival of Authors, including one with author Yuval Noah Harari last year.
Mr. Gulliver arrived in 2020 after 12 years at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, hoping to build the Toronto fest into a destination. Independence bridges that dream with lessons learned from virtual pandemic programming and Harbourfront’s fiscal reality. Bringing the fest to a more central location will offer greater accessibility, too.
“We’ve had to re-evaluate how we engage audiences – to look at meeting them halfway, but also more often and year-round,” Mr. Gulliver said.
The Festival of Authors will still be able to use office space at Harbourfront. “We’ll look for ways to collaborate and support them going forward,” the complex’s chief executive officer Cathy Loblaw said. “But we really needed to focus back on the core of Harbourfront Centre and get that to a strengthened and stabilized place to support our broad array of art, culture, education, community and recreation.”
Ms. Loblaw said the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery will also become fully independent, and that it would continue to provide space and maintenance without charging rent. The gallery’s executive director Carolyn Vesely confirmed this, adding that the Power Plant would adopt a new business model in a transition taking place over the next year.
The Festival of Authors is launching a new romance-book festival in late November, too. And its flagship festival, returning to late October after several years in September, will be reduced to five days from 11.
The new dates will also be adjacent to those of the Vancouver Writers Fest, allowing both organizers to collaboratively recruit authors to come to Canada and split the costs. This has historically been beneficial to both festivals, and will only be more helpful with the passing of time as costs rise across the entire arts sector.
“Coming back from COVID, it wasn’t just a matter of encouraging audiences to come back,” said Leslie Hurtig, the Vancouver fest’s artistic director. Though her audience has returned, she said, she’s also been dealing “with the approximately 20-per-cent increase due to inflation on everything that that has to do with programming: airfares, hotel rooms, venue rentals, staffing costs, printing costs, et cetera.”
The Kingston WritersFest in Ontario received blowback last fall after telling authors there wasn’t enough money to pay them for their latest appearances – then soliciting them for donations. In January, the festival said it would shut down, citing declining attendance and high costs.
But earlier this week, a new interim board headed by founding artistic director Merilyn Simonds announced that it had fundraised enough to pay nearly all of its suppliers, including authors, and would work toward re-establishing the festival on more sustainable footing.
“People still need people, they still want conversation, they still want ideas,” Ms. Simonds said. “For me, that really bodes well for literary festivals in Canada.”
