The Massey Lectures is an annual five-part series of lectures given in Canada by distinguished writers, thinkers, and scholars who explore important ideas and issues of contemporary interest. [1] Created in 1961 in honour of Vincent Massey, a former Governor General of Canada and coordinator of the 1951 Massey Report, it is widely regarded as one of the most acclaimed lecture series in the country.
Notable Massey lecturers have included Northrop Frye, John Kenneth Galbraith, Noam Chomsky, Jean Vanier, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Franklin, George Steiner, Claude Levi Strauss, and Nobel laureates Martin Luther King Jr., George Wald, Willy Brandt, and Doris Lessing. [2] In 2003, novelist Thomas King was the first person of Cherokee descent to be invited as a lecturer. [3]
The event is co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press and Massey College in the University of Toronto. The lectures have been broadcast by the CBC Radio show Ideas since 1965.
Prior to 1989, the lectures were recorded for broadcast in a CBC Radio studio in Toronto. From 1989 to 2002, the lectures were delivered before a live audience at the University of Toronto. Since 2002, the lectures have been presented and recorded for broadcast at public events in five different cities across Canada. [4]
The lectures are broadcast each November on Ideas and published simultaneously in book form by House of Anansi Press. [5]
Many of the lectures can be listened to online on the Ideas website, while others can be purchased on various sites. [6]
In addition to the print version for each individual year, several of the earlier lectures are available in compilations, including The Lost Massey Lectures. [7]
For Lawrence Hill's Massey Lectures in 2013, the CBC Radio website featured a visual narrative to accompany that year's theme Blood: The Stuff of Life. The story included full-screen images of blood, animations that visually demonstrated historical attitudes towards blood and videos of people affected culturally by it.
1996 did not feature a lecture because Ideas producers and the selected Lecturer Robert Theobald could not agree on an appropriate manuscript for the programme. [23] The theme was to have been on the future of work. Theobald later published his manuscript as Reworking Success: New Communities at the Millennium (1997). [24]
Tomson Highway is an Indigenous Canadian playwright, novelist, children's author and musician. He is best known for his plays The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, both of which won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play and the Floyd S. Chalmers Award.
Thomas King is an American-born Canadian writer and broadcast presenter who most often writes about First Nations.
Lawrence Hill is a Canadian novelist, essayist, and memoirist. He is known for his 2007 novel The Book of Negroes, inspired by the Black Loyalists given freedom and resettled in Nova Scotia by the British after the American Revolutionary War, and his 2001 memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. The Book of Negroes was adapted for a TV mini-series produced in 2015. He was selected in 2013 for the Massey Lectures: he drew from his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life, published that year. His ten books include other non-fiction and fictional works, and some have been translated into other languages and published in numerous other countries.
Jean Vanier was a Canadian Catholic philosopher and theologian. In 1964, he founded L'Arche, an international federation of communities spread over 37 countries for people with developmental disabilities and those who assist them. In 1971, he co-founded Faith and Light with Marie-Hélène Mathieu, which also works for people with developmental disabilities, their families, and friends in over 80 countries. He continued to live as a member of the original L'Arche community in Trosly-Breuil, France, until his death.
Janice Gross Stein is a Canadian political scientist and international relations expert. Stein is a specialist in Middle East area studies, negotiation theory, foreign policy decision-making, and international conflict management.
Lisa Moore is a Canadian writer and editor established in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Margaret Visser is a Canadian writer and broadcaster who lives in Toronto, Paris, and South West France. Her subject matter is the history, anthropology, and mythology of everyday life.
A Short History of Progress is a non-fiction book and lecture series by Ronald Wright about societal collapse. The lectures were delivered as a series of five speeches, each taking place in different cities across Canada as part of the 2004 Massey Lectures which were broadcast on the CBC Radio program, Ideas. The book version was published by House of Anansi Press and released at the same time as the lectures. The book spent more than a year on Canadian best-seller lists, won the Canadian Book Association's Libris Award for Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and was nominated for the British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. It has since been reprinted in a hardcover format with illustrations and also in Kindle and EPUB digital formats.
Margaret Olwen MacMillan, is a Canadian historian and professor at the University of Oxford. She is former provost of Trinity College, Toronto, and professor of history at the University of Toronto and previously at Ryerson University. MacMillan is an expert on the history of international relations.
Race Against Time: Searching for Hope in AIDS-Ravaged Africa is a non-fiction book written by Stephen Lewis for the Massey Lectures. Lewis wrote it in early to mid-2005 and House of Anansi Press released it as a corresponding lecture series began in October 2005. Each of the book's chapters were delivered as a different lecture in a different Canadian city, beginning in Vancouver on October 18 and ending in Toronto on October 28. The speeches were aired on CBC Radio One between November 7 and 11. The author and orator, Stephen Lewis, was at that time the United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa and former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations. Although he wrote the book and lectures in his role as a concerned Canadian citizen, his criticism of the United Nations (UN), international organizations, and other diplomats, including naming specific people, was called undiplomatic and led several reviewers to speculate whether he would be removed from his UN position.
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside is a collection of five essays by the British writer Doris Lessing, which were previously delivered as the 1985 Massey Lectures.
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth is a non-fiction book written by Margaret Atwood, about the nature of debt, for the 2008 Massey Lectures. Each of the book's five chapters was delivered as a one-hour lecture in a different Canadian city, beginning in St. John's, Newfoundland, on October 12 and ending in Toronto on November 1. The lectures were broadcast on CBC Radio One's Ideas November 10–14. The book was published by House of Anansi Press, both in paperback and in a limited edition hardcover.
Michael William Higgins is a Canadian academic and writer. He was the interim principal of St. Mark's College and president of Corpus Christi College from July 15, 2020- July 31, 2023. Higgins and his wife Krystyna, a professional piano accompanist, liturgical musician and freelance editor, have four adult children---Rebecca, Andrew, Sarah and Alexa.
Payam Akhavan is an Iranian-born Canadian lawyer. He is nominated as a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague by Bangladesh. He is a Senior Fellow at Massey College at the University of Toronto and is a visiting adjunct at its Faculty of Law.
Player One: What Is to Become of Us is a novel written by Douglas Coupland for the 2010 Massey Lectures. Each of the book's five chapters was delivered as a one-hour lecture in a different Canadian city: Vancouver on October 12, Regina on October 14, Charlottetown on October 19, Ottawa on October 25 and ending in Toronto on October 29. The lectures were broadcast on CBC Radio One's Ideas, November 8–12. The book was published by House of Anansi Press.
Esi Edugyan is a Canadian novelist. She has twice won the Giller Prize, for her novels Half-Blood Blues (2011) and Washington Black (2018).
Winter: Five Windows on the Season is a nonfiction book written by Adam Gopnik for the 2011 Massey Lectures. Each of the book's five chapters had been delivered as a one-hour lecture discussing artistic portrayals of winter: its impact on culture and societies, polar exploration, and winter recreation. Each lecture was held in a different Canadian city: Montreal on October 12, Halifax on October 14, Edmonton on October 21, Vancouver on October 23, and ending in Toronto on October 26. The book was published by House of Anansi Press while the lectures were broadcast on CBC Radio One's Ideas between November 7 and 11.
Half-Blood Blues is a fiction novel by Canadian writer Esi Edugyan, and first published in June 2011 by Serpent’s Tail. The book's dual narrative centers around Sidney "Sid" Griffiths, a journeyman jazz bassist. Griffiths' friend and bandmate, Hieronymus "Hiero" Falk, is caught on the wrong side of 1939 Nazi ideology and is essentially lost to history. Some of his music survives, however, and half a century later, fans of Falk discover his forgotten story.
Tanya Talaga is a Canadian journalist and author of Anishinaabe and Polish descent. She worked as a journalist at the Toronto Star for over twenty years, covering health, education, local issues, and investigations. She is now a regular columnist with the Globe and Mail. Her 2017 book Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City was met with acclaim, winning the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize for non-fiction and the 2017 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. Talaga is the first woman of Anishinaabe descent to be named a CBC Massey Lecturer. She holds honorary doctorates from Lakehead University and from Ryerson University.
All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward is a 2018 book by Anishinaabe journalist Tanya Talaga about the colonisation of Indigenous peoples in Canada and internationally.