Out of this world New sci-fi/fantasy bookstore a welcome addition By: Ben Sigurdson Posted: 4:46 PM CDT Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026

A new chapter has begun in Winnipeg’s literary landscape with the opening of science fiction and fantasy bookstore Other Places Books.

Located at 436 Graham Ave., the queer-owned and operated shop is the latest in a host of genre bookstores to have opened in the city over the last few years. In addition to longtime mainstay Whodunit? Mystery Bookstore (163 Lilac St.), the local scene now also features a horror bookstore (Raven’s End Books, which opened at 1859 Portage Ave. in 2024) and a shop focused on romance (Bound to Please, which opened at 995 McPhillips St. earlier this year).

The 900 titles currently in stock at Other Places, which opened Tuesday, span a range of sci-fi and fantasy sub-genres, with a particular focus on queer writers and storylines. The bookstore is the brainchild of Didi Chanoch, who moved to Winnipeg from Israel in 2025 after the Canadian federal government began offering work permits to those in Israel and Palestine looking to leave the area due to the conflict.

Winnipeg ended up on Chanoch’s radar in large part due to a more reasonable cost of living than other Canadian cities.

“But then beyond the rent, I looked a little closer and Winnipeg seemed to have a cool little personality that I thought would be a good fit for me — it’s a bit of an oddball city,” Chanoch says.

Prior to opening Other Places, the 54-year-old Chanoch, whose pronouns are they/them, worked in translation and purchasing of science fiction books in Israel, and has long been active in the online sci-fi community. So it didn’t take long to land on the idea of opening a niche bookstore — particularly once they looked at the landscape of booksellers in the city.

“Winnipeg has a horror bookstore, a mystery bookstore, comics bookstores, a manga store, a romance bookstore. Winnipeg didn’t have a science fiction bookstore. I thought, ‘There’s an open niche here, and it’s my niche,’” says Chanoch, one of the store’s four staff members.

The search for a location for Other Places evolved as Chanoch became more acquainted with their new hometown.

“It took me a while to get to know the city enough to be able to understand what locations mean, to zero in on a few areas that I thought could be a good home,” Chanoch says.

They eventually landed on Graham Avenue; the owners of Graham Convenience Store were looking to downsize the shop’s footprint, resulting in the space at 436 Graham Ave. becoming available.

“I was able to map out and see the space would work for the store, the rent was reasonable and the property manager was very reasonable and nice. And the folks at Bison Books were very enthusiastic about the idea of having another bookstore in the area,” Chanoch says.

Bison is at 424 Graham Ave., in the same building as Other Places. Owners of both bookstores see the proximity of the two as complementing each other nicely.

“If somebody’s going to come down here, they’re more likely to come for two bookstores than for one,” Chanoch says. “Plus we only sell new books, and Bison sells second-hand and antique books. A person could buy a book here and eventually sell it to them, and somebody else could buy it from them. It’s the circle of a book’s life.”

Chanoch has found the city’s independent bookstores to be supportive on the path to opening Other Places — especially the fellow genre bookstores.

“Raven’s End invited me to their book club so I could tell their customers about my store. They have a fantasy book club, so that’s a perfect marriage — and they’re also a pretty queer bookstore,” says Chanoch.

The intersection of queer writers and readers with sci-fi and fantasy is a natural one, Chanoch reckons.

“A lot of people really identify strongly with the genres, for obvious reasons — they have always explored identity in ways that either are directly about queerness or could easily be interpreted as such and can be absorbed by a reader as that. I was able to pretty much a fill a bookstore with books that are in some way queer.”

As an example, Chanoch mentions Arkady Martine’s Teixcalaan duology — both books from the series, A Desolation Called Peace and A Memory Called Empire, won Hugo Awards, the sci-fi and fantasy world’s top prize.

“These are queer science fiction books written by a lesbian author married to another lesbian author whose books we also carry,” Chanoch says. “These books both won the best novel prize at the Hugo Awards. If you look at the list of Hugo finalists for best novel in the past decade, you’ll see a huge number of queer authors and queer books.”

Other Places Books is open from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday (which mirrors Bison Books’ hours of operation). Chanoch plans to begin hosting in-store author events, but in the meantime is bringing Trinidadian-Canadian speculative fiction author Suzan Palumbo to the Winnipeg Queer Book Fair, taking place Sept. 27 at the Victoria Inn (1808 Wellington Ave).

Visit opbooks.store for more on Other Places, including books currently in stock.

ben.sigurdson@winnipegfreepress.com