About the speaker
CS Richardson is an award-winning novelist and book designer. His first novel, The End of the Alphabet, was an international bestseller published in fourteen countries and ten languages, was awarded the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Novel (Canada & the Caribbean), and was adapted for radio drama by BBC 4.
His second effort, The Emperor of Paris, was released in Canada in August 2012. Currently a national bestseller, the novel has been longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. It will be published in the UK and Europe in 2013.
As a book designer, Richardson has designed over 1,500 titles, producing work for a long list of notable Canadian and international writers, including John Irving, Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, Wayson Choy, Annabel Lyon and Graham Gibson.
THE EMPEROR OF PARIS tells the magical story of an unlikely romance between an illiterate Parisian baker and a woman with her head permanently buried in a book.
Like his father before him, Octavio runs the Notre-Dame bakery, and knows the secret recipe for the perfect Parisian baguette. But, also like his father, Octavio has never mastered the art of reading. His only knowledge of the world beyond the bakery door comes from his imagination.
Just a few streets away, Isabeau works out of sight in the basement of the Louvre, trying to forget her disfigured beauty by losing herself in the paintings she restores and the stories she reads.
The two might never have met, but for a curious chain of coincidences involving a mysterious traveller, an impoverished painter, a jaded bookseller, and a book of fairytales, lost and found.
CS RICHARDSON’s first novel, The End of the Alphabet, was an international bestseller published in thirteen countries and ten languages. Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Canada & the Caribbean), it was named on four Best of the Year lists and was adapted for radio drama by BBC Radio 4. Richardson is also an accomplished and award-winning book designer. He lives and works in Toronto.
Richardson lives and works in Toronto.