Welcome to our 49th Tartan Turban Secret Reading. Curated by Deepa Rajagopalan. Featuring Su Chang, Chido Muchemwa, Farah Ghafoor, Atom Cheung and Taneet Grewal. 7–10 pm, Thursday, July 23rd, 2026, at Barrett and Welsh, 577 Kingston Road, Suite #301, Toronto, ON M4E 1R3.
The in-person event will be live-streamed and recorded for accessibility. A link will be provided to attendees who register for the live stream.
We do ask that you register if you plan to attend. Tickets are free and reserving a spot helps us track numbers and access funding. Book a free ticket now at Lu.Ma.
The Tartan Turban Secret Readings are variously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the League of Canadian Poets, The Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council and The Writers’ Union of Canada.
Featured writers
Our curator for TTSR49, Deepa Rajagopalan is the author of the short story collection, Peacocks of Instagram, shortlisted for the 2024 Giller prize, and an Apple Books Best Books of the Year 2024. She won the 2021 PEN Canada New Voices Award for the title story of the collection. Her work has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies such as the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, the New Quarterly, Room, the Malahat Review, and the Notre Dame Review. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph.
Farah Ghafoor is the author of Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025). Named a CBC Best Book of the Year, Shadow Price was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, the Raymond Souster Award, and the Toronto Book Awards. Selections of Ghafoor’s debut won the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize, were shortlisted for the Far Horizons Award, and longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Her work appears in various podcasts and radio shows, anthologies, post-secondary course curricula, art exhibitions like Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? (2025) and Structural Integrity (2025), as well as in magazines such as The Walrus, The Offing, Brick Magazine, and The Fiddlehead. She lives in Tkaranto (Toronto).
Based in Kitchener, Ontario, Taneet Grewal is a neurodivergent South Asian writer passionate about amplifying marginalized voices and supporting fellow BIPOC creatives. Her love for storytelling began in childhood and grew into journalism focused on human rights, backed by a Liberal Arts degree from York University. Today, her work explores motherhood, gender equality, female empowerment, and breaking toxic generational cycles. She has published a poetry collection dedicated to her daughters and is currently working on a project centred on mental health and addiction in the Punjabi community. Her writing has appeared in Brown Girl Magazine, OMNI Television, and the Punjabi Art Collective.
Chido Muchemwa is a writer and academic from Harare. She is the author of the short story collection Who Will Bury You and Other Stories. Her short stories have previously appeared in The Baltimore Review, Canthius, Catapult, Humber Literary Review, and Prism International amongst others. She is a 2022 Miles Morland Scholar, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wyoming. Muchemwa is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
Su Chang is a Shanghai-born Chinese-Canadian writer. Her debut novel, The Immortal Woman, was published with House of Anansi in 2025. The book is a CBC Best Fiction of 2025, a Toronto Book Award nominee, a Foreword INDIES finalist, shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and won the 2025 Independent Publisher Book Award, among other accolades. CBC named her a “Writer to Watch” in 2025. Her short stories have won awards or been shortlisted by the Montreal Fiction Prize, SASFest Fiction Contest, Prairie Fire Fiction Contest, Canadian Authors’ Association National Contest, Disquiet Literary Prize, among others. She is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers and a proud member of the Writers Union of Canada.
Atom Cheung is a Hong Kong Canadian poet whose work captures the quiet, intricate details of everyday life. His first full-length collection Forty-One Frames will be published by Musical Stone in September. Through sharp, minimalist vignettes of domestic spaces and window-framed observations, the book examines the internal struggle to document reality before it slips away. Atom is also the voice of Atomic Heart, a confessional audio blog delivered through the reading of poems. It’s available as a podcast on various platforms including Apple and Spotify.
Open mic
Anyone attending is welcome to read or perform (if you are a musician) in our open mic sessions.
If you are a writer or musician who would like to perform in the open mic session, we ask that you listen in to at least one session to get the flavour of the evening and join in on your next visit.
To participate in TTSR #49, please contact Deepa Rajagopalan or series curator Gavin Barrett. This allows us to line up readers and manage the evening in a way that respects each writer’s work.
The ambience at our readings is intimate, extremely informal and very supportive. Open mic readers are given four minutes in total, including a brief introduction to themselves and their work. There are detailed open mic guidelines posted in our FB group.
Open mic readers who have published works they would like to offer for sale are free to mention these upon finishing their readings.
The Tartan Turban Secret Readings 