A Sneak Preview of Festival 2020

Only six more months until Denman hosts the 18th Readers and Writers Festival!

Our organizing committee has been hard at work lining up authors, and we are now halfway to having a complete list of invited literary guests.  Here’s where we stand in mid-January.

For regular listeners of CBC Radio’s White Coat, Black Art, Dr. Brian Goldman is a source of wise medical information and advice, and this July, festival-goers will be able to meet him in person.  An emergency room physician in Toronto, and author of The Power of Kindness, Goldman brings a wealth of knowledge about health policy as well as practical experiences on the front lines of medicine.

Another intriguing non-fiction writer is Libby Davies, former long-time NDP Member of Parliament from Vancouver and a social activist since the 70s.  She’s retired now from politics but has written a memoir Outside In about her life as a politician.  Her leadership in the political arena as well as her commitment to social justice are qualities we feel sure will resonate with her audience.

A third non-fiction author will be Kate Harris.  Her book Land of Lost Borders recounts a harrowing and incident-filled 10,000 kms bicycle trip across the rooftops of Asia, following the ancient Silk Road.  Harris is a former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, now living off the grid in northern BC near the Yukon border.

Our fiction category is represented so far by Peggy Herring, from Victoria.  Former radio and TV journalist, and international development worker in Asia, Herring has written two novels, the latest is Anna, With Thunder, an historical novel about a young Russian woman, shipwrecked in the early 1800s, along with a crew of fellow Russians off the coast of Oregon.  Living with Indigenous people on the Olympic Peninsula, Anna encounters both friendship and danger.  Several of us on the committee have read the book and were impressed by the language, setting, and depictions of interactions between Anna and her hosts.

Denman’s festival audiences always enjoy authors who are also ‘performance artists’, and we are lucky this coming July that Tetsuro Shigematsu has accepted our invitation.  He is a playwright, broadcaster, comedian, and film-maker from Vancouver.  His publications are Empire of the Sun and 1 Hour Photo, which was short-listed this year for the Governor General’s Award for English Drama.

Stay tuned for the rest of our 2020 line-up, as well as more news about our annual summer literary weekend.

Stewart Goodings
January 2019