2025 Festival Line-up
Authors
Additional authors will be listed shortly
Suzette Mayr won the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her latest novel, The Sleeping Car Porter, was published in the Fall 2022. “Mayr’s sixth novel tells the story of Baxter, a Black man in 1929 who works as a sleeping-car porter on a train that travels across the country. He smiles and tries to be invisible to the passengers, but what he really wants is to save up and go to dentistry school. On one particular trip out west, the train is stalled and Baxter finds a naughty postcard of two gay men. The postcard reawakens his memories and longings and puts his job in jeopardy.”
Mayr is the author of six novels including Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall. Her fourth novel Monoceros won the ReLit Award and the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize, was longlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize, and nominated for a Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction and the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction. Monoceros was also included on The Globe and Mail’s 100 Best Books of 2011. Her novels have also been nominated for the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Henry Kreisel Award for Best First Book. She has done inter-disciplinary work with Calgary theatre company Theatre Junction, visual artists Lisa Brawn and Geoff Hunter, and she was a writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary and at Widener University, Pennsylvania. She is a former President of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Calgary.
Latest Book: The Sleeping Car PorterPlease consider purchasing this book through Abraxas, our local independent bookstore and an important partner in the Festival. Open page: Abraxas
Website: Open Page

Fiona Tinwei Lam has authored three poetry collections and a children’s book. She edited The Bright Well:Contemporary Canadian Poems about Facing Cancer, and co-edited two nonfiction anthologies. Shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Prize and other awards, her work appears in over 45 anthologies, including Best Canadian Poetry (2010 and 2020) and Best Canadian Essays 2024. She has collaborated on award-winning poetry videos that have screened at festivals internationally and teaches at SFU Continuing Studies. She was Vancouver’s poet laureate 2022-24.
Latest Book: Odes & LamentsPlease consider purchasing this book through Abraxas, our local independent bookstore and an important partner in the Festival. Open page: Abraxas
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She teaches in the Writing and Publishing Program at SFU.
Please consider purchasing this book through Abraxas, our local independent bookstore and an important partner in the Festival. Open page: Abraxas
Website: Open Page

Latest Book: A History of Burning
Please consider purchasing this book through Abraxas, our local independent bookstore and an important partner in the Festival. Open page: Abraxas
Website: Open Page

Lenore Newman’s love affair with food began on her family’s fishing boats, where she gained an early introduction into the world of direct marketing of local products. Lenore is an expert in food and agricultural technology and policy, and she is the Director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at UFV. She holds a research chair in food and agriculture innovation and is a past Canada Research Chair in Food Security and the Environment. Lenore is an emeritus member of the Royal Society of Canada’s New College. She holds a PhD in Environmental Studies from York University and sits on the Global X-Prize Brain Trust. She has written two award-winning books, Speaking in Cod Tongues: A Canadian Culinary Journey, and Lost Feast. She is co-author of Dinner on Mars, published in October, 2022.
Latest Book: Dinner on MarsPlease consider purchasing this book through Abraxas, our local independent bookstore and an important partner in the Festival. Open page: Abraxas
Website: Open Page

Drew Hayden Taylor is an award winning playwright, novelist, filmmaker and journalist. Born, raised and living on the Curve Lake First Nation in Ontario, he has done everything from performing stand up comedy at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. to being Artistic Director of Canada’s premiere Indigenous theatre company, Native Earth Performing Arts. Currently, his most recent novel, COLD was released by McClelland & Stewart and he is writing a history of Indigenous theatre.
Latest Book: Cold: A NovelPlease consider purchasing this book through Abraxas, our local independent bookstore and an important partner in the Festival. Open page: Abraxas
Website: Open Page

Sarah Leavitt is the author of the acclaimed comic collection Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Love and Grief (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2024); the graphic memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (Freehand Books, 2010), which is currently in production as a feature-length animation; and the award-winning historical fiction comic Agnes, Murderess (Freehand Books, 2019). She is an assistant professor in the School of Creative Writing at UBC in Vancouver, BC, where she has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate comics classes since 2012.
Latest Book: Something Not NothingPlease consider purchasing this book through Abraxas, our local independent bookstore and an important partner in the Festival. Open page: Abraxas
Website: Open Page

Returning to our Denman festival is John Vaillant, an author and freelance writer based in Vancouver, BC whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Guardian, among others. His journalism, fiction, and non-fiction explores collisions between human ambition and the natural world.
His latest book is the 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in General Nonfiction, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (Knopf, 2023), a stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind. In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world. With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.
Latest Book: Fire WeatherPlease consider purchasing this book through Abraxas, our local independent bookstore and an important partner in the Festival. Open page: Abraxas
Website: Open Page

Please consider purchasing this book through Abraxas, our local independent bookstore and an important partner in the Festival. Open page: Abraxas
Website: Open Page
