Margaret Atwood and Elamin Abdelmahmoud at the 2026 Toronto International Festival of Authors.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
When the Toronto International Festival of Authors launches the fifth edition of its Motive Crime & Mystery Festival in June, readers and organizers will have more to celebrate than its new relationship with a major counterpart in France.
Fifteen months after TIFA formally separated from its former parent – the financially beleaguered Harbourfront Centre – its artistic director and chief executive, Roland Gulliver, says the organization has secured major funding and is selling significantly more tickets and passes.
A gift of an undisclosed amount from Canada’s Weston family, secured last year in TIFA’s early months of independence, will put the organization “on a sound financial footing” for the next five years, Gulliver said in an interview. The average paid daily attendance for last year’s fall flagship festival was up 155 per cent from a year earlier. And, he added, the organization has already sold twice as many three-day passes for this year’s Motive, scheduled for June 5 through 7.
It’s been “pretty special,” Gulliver said, “that we were, as people say, flying the airplane as we were building it.”
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He’s referring to the heavy bureaucratic lift that TIFA had to undergo as it separated from Harbourfront last spring. The shift required staff to build up structures for everything from IT to human resources. And while Harbourfront had offered office space, Gulliver said his staff has instead set up in a co-working space in downtown Toronto. This will keep staff closer to the University of Toronto’s Victoria University, now a key partner to the festival, whose 500-capacity Isabel Bader Theatre has become a central hub for TIFA events.
Several events for this year’s Motive festival will take place at the theatre, including a talk with headliner Shari Lapena about the 10-year anniversary of her breakout thriller The Couple Next Door, as well as a discussion on craft with authors Clare Mackintosh and Nita Prose.
“I’ve often said there are a lot of crime readers, and they don’t really have their books represented in literary festivals,” Lapena said in an interview. “I travel a lot for festivals, and so many of the big happening cities have crime-writing festivals. It’s really nice to have that for readers in Toronto.”
TIFA has secured major funding and is now selling significantly more tickets and passes, according to its artistic director and chief executive.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
Other authors scheduled to speak include Olivier Norek (The Winter Warriors), Nicholas Shakespeare (Frame 37), Kang Hwagil and Hye-young Pyun from South Korea, and Hannelore Cayre and Johana Gustawsson from France.
The French authors will participate in a panel about their country’s polar crime-writing scene. It’s being presented in conjunction with Quais du Polar, France’s biggest crime-fiction festival, deepening Motive and TIFA’s connections to the global literary-festival circuit.
“Bringing Canadian authors together with international writers is at the heart of everything we like to do,” Gulliver said.
Later this year, Gulliver will head back to his old stomping grounds at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, alongside Shelley Youngblut, chief executive of Calgary’s Wordfest to take part in an international forum of lit-fest directors for discussions about the sector’s future.
Meanwhile, Gulliver feels more confident than before about TIFA’s place in Toronto. He pointed to last year’s main festival, the inaugural edition independent of Harbourfront Centre, when author Francesca Wade was on deck to discuss her biography of Gertrude Stein – at 8 p.m. on Halloween, during Game 6 of the World Series between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Los Angeles Dodgers.
“We had a full room,” Gulliver recalled. “I think that showed we could be more ambitious in our programming.”