Wordfest is delighted to present Ben Macintyre, master of the spy genre, and his newest blockbuster, The Siege: A Six Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special-Forces Operation That Shocked the World. The sure-to-be compelling conversation, hosted by Wordfest’s Shelley Youngblut, includes an audience Q & A and book signing, fuelled by Owl’s Nest Books, who will also have copies of Macintyre’s impressive backlist on hand (order in advance here).
We are grateful to Penguin Random House Canada for making it possible to connect you with Ben Macintyre.
A brilliant, seat-of-your-pants hostage-taking and daring SAS rescue mission of the Iran Embassy in London in 1980, this is Ben Macintyre at the very height of his story-telling powers.
On April 30, 1980, six heavily armed gunmen burst into the Iranian embassy on Prince’s Gate, overlooking Hyde Park in London. There, they took 26 hostages, including embassy staff, visitors, and three British citizens. A tense six-day siege ensued – all on television, over a Bank Holiday weekend – in which police negotiators and psychiatrists sought a bloodless end to the standoff, while the SAS laid plans for a daring rescue mission: Operation Nimrod.
This mission marked a fundamental turning point in global history, when Middle Eastern terrorism arrived in the West. Britain had experienced IRA terrorism before, but never an international terrorist incident on this scale. It was a precursor to the brutal Iran-Iraq War that would follow, in which millions perished. Yet there exists to this day no full account of the week-long siege and gripping rescue.
Drawing on interviews with police, hostages, terrorists and key SAS figures, and cutting through the sensationalism and misinformation, bestselling historian Ben Macintyre (author of Sunday Times #1s Colditz, The Spy and the Traitor and SAS: Rogue Heroes) goes deep into the archives with exclusive access to tell the story of what really happened and give the first definitive account of a moment that forever changed the way the nation thought about the SAS – and itself.
Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times (U.K.) and the bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor, A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.
Shelley Youngblut is the CEO & Creative Ringleader of Wordfest. She was the recipient of the 2020 Calgary Award for Community Achievement in the Arts and the 2018 Rozsa Award for Arts Leadership. She also won the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Western Magazine Awards. Youngblut was the founding editor of Calgary’s award-winning Swerve magazine and has created magazines for ESPN, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Nickelodeon, Western Living, and The Globe and Mail. She was also a former pop-culture correspondent for ABC World News Now and Canada AM. Follow her on Facebook @ShelleyYoungblut and Instagram/Threads @youngblutshelley.
Senator Patti LaBoucane-Benson is a Métis from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta. She is currently the Government Liaison and is the first Indigenous woman to hold a leadership position in the Senate. Her 30-year career has been dedicated to serving her community in Alberta, across Canada and around the world—as the director of a Boys and Girls Club in St. Paul in 1990, through 23 years of service at Native Counselling Services of Alberta (NCSA), and Conference Director and Lead Facilitator of the Nelson Mandela Dialogues in Canada, an international gathering of freedom fighters that took place on Enoch Cree Nation in 2017.
Dr. LaBoucane-Benson’s research for her PhD in Human Ecology focused on how Indigenous families and communities experience their own resilience in response to multiple forms of trauma. Her lifelong work has become an extended conversation about healing from historic trauma.
Dr. LaBoucane-Benson brought her PhD research to life through a work of creative non-fiction, an award-winning graphic novel—The Outside Circle—that tells the story of an inner-city Aboriginal family who transcend poverty, gang affiliation, and hopelessness. Her teaching materials are used in classrooms across Canada and in training sessions for professionals.
Appointed to the Senate in October 2018, the Senator lives fully in the space that helps define Canada. She is an avid gardener and her husband Allen is a traditional Nehiyaw (Cree) hunter; they believe that food security includes the respectful harvest of food from the land. They live near Stony Plain, Alberta, with their son Gabriel, on an acreage that has hosted ceremony, workshops, and dozens of transformational conversations with Elders, elected officials, and leaders from around the world.
Winner, CODE’s 2016 Burt Award for First Nation, Inuit and Métis Literature
In this important graphic novel, two brothers surrounded by poverty, drug abuse, and gang violence, try to overcome centuries of historic trauma in very different ways to bring about positive change in their lives.
Pete, a young Indigenous man wrapped up in gang violence, lives with his younger brother, Joey, and his mother who is a heroin addict. One night, Pete and his mother’s boyfriend, Dennis, get into a big fight, which sends Dennis to the morgue and Pete to jail. Initially, Pete keeps up ties to his crew, until a jail brawl forces him to realize the negative influence he has become on Joey, which encourages him to begin a process of rehabilitation that includes traditional Indigenous healing circles and ceremonies.
Powerful, courageous, and deeply moving, The Outside Circle is drawn from the author’s twenty years of work and research on healing and reconciliation of gang-affiliated or incarcerated Indigenous men.
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
