Writers descending on city this month

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/05/2015 (2869 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg will be the centre of the Canadian literary world for the next two weeks when the Writers’ Union of Canada and the League of Canadian Poets (LCP) gather to hold their annual conferences and general meetings in conjunction with several public literary events.

The Writers’ Union and LCP will hold panel discussions and keynotes on professional issues related to writing as well as carry out their official annual general meeting business.

The gathering includes two high-profile lectures by leading authors, both open to the public. The Anne Szumigalski memorial lecture, delivered by B.C.-based Métis poet Gregory Scofield, takes place Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at the Radisson Hotel.

On Friday, international bestseller and Winnipeg-raised historical-fantasy novelist Guy Gavriel Kay delivers the annual Margaret Laurence lecture, sponsored by the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Kay’s lecture starts at 8 p.m. at the University of Winnipeg’s Eckhardt-Gramatté Hall.

The literary action continues until June 5 with the Envoi Poetry Festival, which presents readings, discussions and lectures from more than 30 indigenous, western Canadian, francophone and spoken-word poets including Scofield, Susan Musgrave, Louise Halfe and Katherena Vermette.

For more information, see www.envoifound.com.

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Jodi Carmichael‘s Winnipeg launch for her YA novel Forever Julia will also be a sendoff for the author, who is moving to the U.K. with her family.

Carmichael, who launches the book at McNally Robinson Booksellers at 2 p.m. today, plans to research a middle-grades spy novel based on her grandfather’s experience with the RCAF in the Second World War. The new novel is set in Oxford, where her grandfather was a Rhodes scholar, and Paris.

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Four years after its original publication in Scandinavian and Central European languages, Anita Daher’s YA novel Wonder Horse is hitting the stands in the author’s native tongue.

Daher launches the English-language edition of the book about a girl and her American paint horse Sunday at 2 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers. The novel, inspired by her own former horse, was published in Norway in 2011 in Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, German, Czech and Hungarian.

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Three of the authors in the newly released collection The Exile Book of New Canadian Noir will read from their selections May 27 in one of the cities where “Canadian Noir” seems the least oxymoronic.

Editors of the anthology sought out Canadian writers interested in exploring the themes, mood and esthetic of noir, in such appropriately noir settings as Vancouver (rain: check), Montreal (corruption: check) and the Okanagan Valley (peaches?). The defining feature of noir, says contributor and former Winnipegger Corey Redekop, isn’t the crime plot, but the moral grey area in which it takes place.

Winnipeg-based contributors Chadwick Ginther and Keith Cadieux and Redekop will launch the anthology Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at McNally Robinson.

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In the movies, they’d call something like this a reboot.

Edmonton mystery writer Janice MacDonald has revisited and rewritten the first of her novels featuring crime-solving academic Randy Craig. Instead of just reprinting the novel, published in 1993 with the title The Next Margaret and now out of print, MacDonald decided to use the plot elements for a new novel. The new book, titled Another Margaret, is due in the fall from Ravenstone, the mystery and fantasy imprint of Winnipeg’s Turnstone Press.

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