To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the bombing of Air India Flight 182 – the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history that saw 329 fatalities on the Montreal-London-Delhi route – gritLIT, Hamilton’s readers and writers festival, is hosting readings by novelists Padma Viswanathan and Farzana Doctor.

“We’d really wanted Viswanathan to come to gritLIT last year but we weren’t able to make it work with her travel arrangements, as she was teaching in Arkansas at the time,” says gritLIT director Jennifer Gillies. “She actually contacted us saying she’d be in the area helping with a class at McMaster University, and asked if we’d be interested in doing an event in the fall. I said absolutely, and when I started looking for an author to pair with her, we discovered that this wonderful author [Doctor] from Dundurn Press had a book on a similar theme. Because it’s also the 30th anniversary of the bombing, it just seemed serendipitous.”

Viswanathan, a resident of Nelson, B.C., will be reading from her second novel, the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, a story of the crash’s impact on the friends and family of its victims. Toronto-based Doctor will be reading from her recently released novel, All Inclusive, which tells the alternating stories of a woman who works at an all-inclusive resort in Mexico and a victim of Flight 182 who ruminates from beyond the grave.

The reading signifies a change of pace for the annual spring festival, established in 2004, as administrators consider expanding into year-round events.

“We’ll still be running in the spring, we just might be adding a few events throughout the year as well. We’re just kind of test running that idea now,” Gillies says. “The festival is great and it’s growing and we’re very excited about that, but it’s so hard to keep attention focused on it when it only happens once a year, and hard with authors’ scheduling too, especially if they’re somehow involved with universities and colleges.”

Tickets for the event, taking place on Wednesday, Sept. 23 at 7 pm at Hamilton’s Gallery on the Bay, can be purchased from the gritLIT website or at the door.