Ann Kirkland

Ann is the founder of Toronto’s famed ‘summer camp for intellectuals’, Toronto Pursuits. She also leads literary adventures around the world breathing life into literature and art, taking readers beyond the surface to understand both the people and the culture.

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Current Projects

I am going to Asturias in northern Spain to work on a unique trip in August 2018– Shakespeare in the Mountains. We will stay in a small village, reading a play aloud each morning. In the afternoon, we will walk through hill and dale. In the evening, we will cook up a feast together. Our theme will be Love. Our leader will be Jason Preater, the lovely Englishman who has lived in Asturias with wife Carmen for many years. Jason is our beloved guide on the Camino.

Memorable Moment

As part of our June 2016 trip, The Pity of War, I was able to take part in the nightly Last Post ceremony at the Menin Gate in Ypres, Belgium. I had discovered that a relative of a friend back home was memorialized on the wall of the gate, one of the 55,000 soldiers who were killed in the Ypres Salient of World War I and whose graves are unknown. Placing a poppy wreath during that solemn ceremony and accompanying others on the trip who sought and found the graves of their own fallen relatives were deeply moving. Reading the stirring words of the many young war poets at their own well-tended graves only heightened the horror and futility of this war.