CLF Adaptive: Theatre & Cinema

The third chapter of the Canada Literature Festival turns to what happens after the last page is turned. CLF Adaptive explores how a story, once written, finds its way onto a stage or a screen, how a novel becomes a script, a script becomes a performance, and a performance carries an author’s original idea to audiences who may never open the book itself. Running 9–11 October 2026 in Mississauga, this edition brings together novelists, screenwriters, playwrights, directors, and performers to examine literature’s most enduring act of reinvention: adaptation.

Across three days of conversations, screenings, theatre and staged readings, CLF Adaptive asks a simple question with a complicated answer – what survives when a story changes form, and what is gained in the translation? From bestselling authors watching their novels become films, to playwrights bringing text to life before a live audience, this year’s programming treats theatre and cinema not as departures from literature, but as literature’s next chapter. It is a festival built on the belief that a story’s life rarely ends with its last sentence, it simply begins to adapt.