West Coast Authors Blitz the Writers Festival
The Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival travels the globe in search of talent, but B.C. writers form the bedrock of the event.
Take poet Don McKay, two-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, as the most literal example. McKay’s work refuses to “draw a simple clean line between humankind and nature, technology and wilderness,” one critic recently wrote in what could double as a description of Vancouver’s landscape. His recent book, Strike/Slip, mines our tectonic depths for metaphor.
“Grounded in geology, this work is about as elemental as you can get,” says Hal Wake, the new artistic director of the festival, happening October 17-22 on Granville Island.
While some writers are concerned with the rumble below or the landscapes we walk through or imagine, others are reflecting on the world beyond our shores.
Anosh Irani (The Cripple and His Talismans) offers up another vision of his hometown, Bombay, in The Song of Kahunsha, the story of a boy looking for his father on the streets as racial violence rocks the city in 1993.
Vancouver native Madeleine Thien, known for her short story collection Simple Recipes, returns from Quebec City to read from her critically acclaimed novel Certainty, the tale of a Vancouver documentarian unravelling the mystery of her parents’ past in Japanese-occupied Malaysia during the Second World War.
Timothy Taylor delved into Vancouver’s restaurant kitchens in his acclaimed 2001 novel Stanley Park and now focuses on another local preoccupation, architecture, in Story House. Victoria’s Bill Gaston turns his attention from novels and short stories (The Good Body, Sex is Red) to recall his beer-league glory days in Midnight Hockey. With Pleased To Meet You, Vancouver’s Caroline Adderson cuts straight to the heart in nine short stories, the form that first brought her to our attention with Bad Imaginings.
For more on the festival tap into www.writersfest.bc.ca
The festival this year features 85 authors including former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, who unveils her memoir, Heart Matters, in the Bill Duthie Memorial Lecture
