You’re a lad, right? Well then you’re the target audience for this event. You consume “lad lit” by the bushel (sitting in the cab of your pickup waiting for the liquor store to open). The hockey season still hasn’t started, and you just happen to be between dates this evening, so you’re looking for something masculine to do. Well you’re in luck.

Tonight, in Room 7000 at SFU’s Harbour Centre campus (515 West Hastings Street) there will be a talk with British Lad-Lit author Robert Twigger, with a response panel to follow. To quote from the press release:

Twigger — who has won the Newdigate Poetry Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award for Literature — occupies a literary terrain where a masculine performative identity is developed for post-colonial men through a variety of Empire-class male adventures. He has gained a consequential readership among non-middle-class males [ed: that’s you] and his books have proven to be appealing movie material. Big Snake, the author’s hunt for the world’s biggest python [ed: I’m not making this up], is now a National Geographic film, and Mirimax is currently preparing Angry White Pyjamas — a literate reflection on the twelve months that Twigger, a self-described “scrawny Oxford poet,” spent among the Extreme Right in Tokyo in brutal training for a black belt in Yoshinkan aikido — for world-wide movie release.

Twigger sets on Canada as the Empire setting for his newest lad-lit book: Voyageur, just released, takes the form of a recreation of Mckenzie’s trek in a birch-bark canoe from Lake Athabaska to Bella Coola. Fittingly, then, the author has chosen the SFU English Department to give his literary ideas their first open academic airing, here, at our Colloquium. Peter Dickinson and Steve Collis have agreed to participate on the response panel, joining Rebecca Wigod, Books editor for the Vancouver Sun.

Check it out; maybe we’ll go for a beer with Twigger afterwards and discuss his big snake.