Hi, I’m Connor Garel. I’m a writer and editor based in Toronto. Currently, I’m a contributing editor at Dazed Magazine, and a contributing writer for The Walrus.
I write about music, movies, art, and sometimes fashion—but lately, mostly it’s music! From 2023 until 2024, I was the Justice Fund writer-in-residence at The Walrus, where I reported on the repatriation of African art in Canadian museums. Over the last year, I have written profiles of Tems, Azealia Banks, Digga D, Lakeith Stanfield, and more. Before that, I worked as a fact-checker for The Walrus, an associate editor at HuffPost Canada (RIP), and an intern at both ELLE and VICE Canada (also RIP).
Featured Writing
Featured Writing
This was supposed to be a profile of Azealia Banks on the occasion of her signing to Parlophone Records; in the air was the promise of a new album, finally, nearly ten years after her début. But then the record deal imploded, and it became a portrait of an artist who is beholden to no one.
“All her life, bewildered strangers in grocery stores and family members alike would make unsolicited observations about her pitch, leading her to believe she sounded like a boy, or a frog, or that her voice was otherwise ugly. She resolved to sing only in a feathery, artificial falsetto.”
In 2008, the Canadian poet, novelist and playwright M. NourbeSe Philip published her epic poem “Zong!”, which attempted to give voice to the victims of an 18th-century slave ship massacre. When the text was translated into Italian in 2021, without her consent, she no longer recognized it. Who ultimately owns the stories that we tell?
Following a 2017 arrest, drill rapper Digga D was given a Criminal Behaviour Order that required him to get Met Police approval before releasing any music. He was 17. Digga was forbidden from rapping about certain aspects of his life that could be construed as inciting violence, by a police force that targets rap music with terrorism legislation. The censorship left his songs full of blanked out words, and the threat of prison recall looming over him. How do you regain control of your story when you can’t even tell it in full?
Nearly 90% of all art known to originate in Africa is now held overseas, in the collections of European and North American art institutions. I spent a year reporting on the movement to return those looted treasures back to where they came from, with a focus on how Canadian museums are responding to intensifying calls for repatriation in a country that makes a political spectacle of its efforts at “decolonization.”
“On screen she seems to gravitate towards the outcasts, the introverts, the young adults pricked with the abiding sense that something fundamental in their biology makes them incompatible with their surroundings — cosmic typos resisting autocorrect.”
“She can conjure Sunday mornings from a lilting string arrangement, can evoke, from a plaintive piano melody, sunlight across hardwood floors, a spoonful of honey, the feeling of sinking into a hug from an old friend – or, maybe, into a confessional booth.”
“I held Jamaica in my mouth long before I ever saw it, heard its music before I ever felt its sunshine, formed, in my young and nervous imagination, a superior mirage of what it might be like to live there, had my parents not left it behind and then left us, my twin brother and older sister and me, to contend with all the ways that "home" becomes a prickly word.”