The Vic Alumni Reading Series featuring Alex Pugsley
On December 2, 2026, Victoria College’s Centre for Creativity hosted the Alumni Reading Series, featuring Lindsay Zier-Vogel and Alex Pugsley. Both are Victoria College graduates who have recently published Toronto-based novels.
The event, held in the cozy Northrop Frye room in Old Vic, presided over by Professor Adam Sol and attended by the usual Centre for Creativity crowd of creative writing undergraduates, was low-key, insightful, and promoted two exciting new publications.
However, The Strand must be biased toward Alex Pugsley, author of The Education of Aubrey McKee, who both stole the show at the Alumni Reading Series and visited The Strand earlier that day. As a former student journalist, Pugsley was thrilled to revisit his beloved student newspaper.
When he came to visit The Strand during the weekly Masthead meeting, you could tell that Pugsley was a proud proponent of student journalism and deeply sought to connect with the next generation of The Strand. He shared his story with us, read a portion of his novel, discussed his next projects, and even teased some of our team members. His friendly and engaging demeanor left me excited to see him again.
When I next saw Pugsley at his reading in Old Vic, I saw a much quieter and humbler man. He sipped his water nervously as Vogel read from her book and stood to ease his nerves as he read from his. Pugsley, however, did not need the extroversion he displayed in The Strand’s office earlier that day: the beauty of his prose spoke for itself.
Beyond the sheer quality of Pugsley’s book, whose prose writes itself, his narrative and Q&A responses spoke to the issue of obsession. In Pugsley’s movies and novels, he repeatedly returns to relationships on the cusp of maturity. Grounded in Toronto, and exploring what it means to be a body in a city right before you have the urge to settle down, Pugsley’s works traverse the short space of time where one must decide what and who is worth settling for.
Pugsley is also a writer who knows his obsessions and embraces them. When I asked “why Toronto?” he told me that he continues to write about this city because “every night [there is] a fascination.” The constant moving and changing of the city, mirroring the change of that final moment of youth he cannot but return to in his work, draws him to centre his works on Toronto – the welcoming arms of the city, the intricacies of its daily life, and its painful departures.
Today, we are often urged away from our obsessions. If one thing consumes us too much, we want to pull away from it. Hyperfixations are boiled down to their brainrot qualities and not prized for their potential intellectual value. To dive into what consumes us the way that Pugsley does, though a dangerous bet, is also the path toward pure, immersive, all-encompassing art. For the artist to live in what he loves, he allows the reader to learn to love it too.