The Frye Festival

The Frye Symposium Lecture and The Antonine Maillet - Northrop Frye Lecture

Two separate series of lectures take place during the Frye Festival. The Antonine Maillet - Northrop Frye Lecture began in 2006 with Neil Bissoondath, and has since been followed by David Adams Richards in 2007 and Alberto Manguel in 2008, Monique LaRue in 2009 and Noah Richler in 2010 and Margaret Atwood in 2011.

The Frye Symposium Lecture began during the first Festival and continues today. In 2000 David Staines delivered the lecture, followed by Branko Gorjup in 2001, Caterina Nella Cotrupi in 2002. In 2003 there were two Frye Symposium Lectures, one in English by Robert Denham and one in French by Naim Kattan. In 2004 there were also two lectures, both in English, one by John Ayre and one by Michael Dolzani. In 2005 there were two lectures, one by Alvin Lee and one by B. W. Powe. In 2006, the first year of the Maillet-Frye series, there was no Frye Symposium Lecture, but the lecture returned in 2007 when there were again two Frye Symposium Lectures, one by Jean O'Grady and one by Robert Denham. In 2008 there was one lecture, by Glenna Sloan.

The two lecture series are quite separate, with one featuring a well-known writer/thinker, and the other featuring a noted Frye scholar.

A brief history of the Frye Festival

Northrop Frye's presence has always been felt in Moncton. Whether it was as a young boy, riding along the streets of Moncton on his bicycle, or upon his last visit to Moncton when many people came to hear him speak, he has left an indelible mark on the city.

In November 1990, at the invitation of Professor Serge Morin, Northrop Frye returned to Moncton to deliver the Pascal Poirier Lecture at the Université de Moncton. During his stay he had the chance to meet and talk with many Monctonians, and he was able to visit his old home and the grave of his mother in Elmwood Cemetery. 'They were two of the best days of my life,' he reported to fellow Monctonian, Reuben Cohen. The following year, after Frye's death in January 1991, The Northrop Frye Society hosted a gathering of Frye-ites, and John Ayre, Frye's biographer, delivered the Pascal Poirier Lecture.

In 1997 the City of Moncton, under the chairmanship of Paulette Theriault, developed an Arts Policy. As part of this policy it was recommended that the city have a festival to honour Northrop Frye. But it wasn't until December 1998, during the production of a Vision TV documentary in Moncton, that the real seeds of today's Frye Festival were sown.

During this television production entitled "Voices of Vision", John Ralston Saul and Antonine Maillet engaged in a one-hour dialogue about creativity, in both official languages. For festival visionary and founder, Paulette Thériault, more than any other event, this event filmed at the Aberdeen Cultural Centre sparked her imagination and made her believe that a bilingual literary festival, celebrating a great man, a vibrant cultural community and highlighting Atlantic and Acadian authors, was a possibility.

In its first year more than 3,000 people attended the Festival. In 2011 more than 15,000 people attended. The Frye Festival has become one of the major literary events in Canada, and continues to grow every year. More than 350 award-winning authors, from every continent and recipients of almost every major international literary prize, have now attended the Festival. The Festival is the proud recipient of the 2005 Lieutenant-Governor’s Dialogue Award, the 2007 Éloize for Event of the Year and the 2009 TD Canada Trust Arts Organization of the Year by the New Brunswick Foundation for the Arts.

The Frye Festival is Canada's only bilingual, international literary festival, the largest literary happening in Atlantic Canada and is the only festival in the world to honour Northrop Frye.

Participating authors

The complete list of participating authors as of 2016:

Northrop Frye and Moncton

Frye was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec. His father had owned a business in Sherbrooke but in 1919 the business failed and the family was without income or savings. In the fall of 1919 his father relocated his family to Moncton, where he began work as a commercial traveller. His mother was often depressed because of the family financial difficulties and because her oldest child, Howard, had been killed in the war. To her, Moncton was like an "exile."

Northrop Frye was seven years old when the family arrived in Moncton. He attended Victoria School and was quickly approved for Grade 4 because of his advanced reading ability. He attended junior high school in Sussex, New Brunswick and, at not quite 16 years of age he graduated from Moncton's Aberdeen High School near the top of his class. He loved bicycling the countryside around Moncton but his two main interests while in Moncton were his studies and piano. He studied piano with a very fine teacher, George Ross, and at one time thought of a career in music. He was a champion typist. His first romantic adventure was with a Moncton girl, Evelyn Rogers. But eventually his love of literature prevailed and in 1929 he left Moncton to study at the University of Toronto. His mother and father remained in Moncton. His mother died in 1941 and is buried in Moncton’s Elmwood Cemetery.

He famously described his early formal education as "a form of penal servitude" presided over by "a rabble of screaming and strapping spinsters." But he admitted late in life that his high school education was a good one. In 1990, after a brief and triumphant return to Moncton where he lectured at the University of Moncton and was the toast of the town, he said, "They were two of the best days of my life."