Author of The Cellist of Sarajevo gives reading on January 19

Steven Galloway, author of the international best-selling novel "The Cellist of Sarajevo," will give a public reading on Tuesday, January 19, at 7:30 p.m. in the Confederation Centre Art Gallery. His reading is part of the Winter's Tales Authors Series sponsored by the UPEI English Department, with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts.

One day during the siege of Sarajevo, a mortar round lands in a breadline and kills 22 people as a cellist watches from his apartment window. He vows to sit in the crater left by the explosion and play Albinoni's Adagio once a day for each of the 22 victims. 'Arrow,' a gifted female sniper, is asked to protect him.

'Though the setting is the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s,' writes Kahled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, 'this gripping novel transcends time and place....a testimony to the struggle to find meaning, grace, and humanity, even amid the most unimaginable horrors.'

Galloway was born and raised in British Columbia. His debut novel, "Finnie Walsh" (2000), was nominated for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award. His second novel, "Ascension" (2003), was nominated for the B.C. Book Prizes' Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. "The Cellist of Sarajevo" was published in 2008. He teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University.