Do You Remember Being Born?

Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels writes a moving, innovative novel about an ageing poet laureate who "sells out" by agreeing to collaborate with a Big Tech company's poetry AI. Do You Remember Being Born? is sensitively narrated by the ageing, world-renowned poet Marian Ffarmer. Marian's pristine life of the mind for which she's sacrificed nearly all personal relationships, from romance to friendship to showing up for her son, is interrupted one day by a cryptic invitation from a tech giant. "Come to California", the invitation beckons, and write with a machine. The Company's lucrative offer for Marian to compose a 'historic partnership' of a poem with their highly intelligent poetry bot, Charlotte, much as it chafes at everything she believes about art-making as an individual pursuit, is a second chance she cannot resist. And so to California, she goes, a sceptic. But as unexpectedly welcome to Marian as suddenly being a financially reliable parent is her generative, growing fascination with Charlotte.