Munira Premji

FOLD selects Choosing Hope for their September Challenge

The Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) is Canada’s first festival for diverse authors and storytellers. Each year, the FOLD’s Reading Challenge encourages booklovers to diversify their reading and their listening by asking one important question: Who’s missing? Each month, the FOLD features one of the challenges, providing suggested titles. As shown in the graphic below, for the month of September, FOLD features books by authors living with chronic illnesses.

I am so humbled that the FOLD team has chosen my book, Choosing Hope: 1 Woman. 3 Cancers, as one of the books for their September reading challenge. Their intent is to help readers reflect on what it is like to live with a chronic illness and how it is possible to thrive in spite of overwhelming challenges.

Writing this book was a tough process. For me, it meant re-living through every painful memory of the diagnoses and treatment, including long bouts of chemotherapy, painful radiation, invasive and multiple surgeries and a difficult stem cell transplant. It meant talking about my losses – loss of identity, of purpose, of stamina, of work, of self-worth. For my family, it meant writing about their lived experience of what is was like to be a caregiver for someone living on borrowed time. The statistics are daunting. Today, 1 in nearly 2 Canadians will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. This book captures the the stark reality of being diagnosed with a chronic illness, the surprising gifts that come with this, and insights and lessons learned.

For more information about the September FOLD challenge, please click on the link below.

https://thefoldcanada.org/webinars-activities/the-reading-challenge/2021-fold-challenge-september/