Search
-
April 24, 2024
Writers' Trust Announces 2024 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award Finalists for Fiction & Poetry
Today the Writers’ Trust of Canada announced the finalists in both the Fiction and Poetry categories for the prestigious RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. The prizes, which in recent ...
-
May 07, 2024
John Vaillant Wins the 2024 Writers' Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing
The Writers’ Trust of Canada has awarded John Vaillant the $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for his book Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast (Knopf Canada). The award was ...
-
July 08, 2024
The Magic of Letter Writing
Summer challenge: Write a letter to your favourite authorWhen I was in Grade 3, I loved Jean Little’s books. So I did what I always do: I wrote her a letter. I told her all of my favourite things about ...
-
August 20, 2024
Dive Into the Strangely Wonderful World of an Octopus in Deborah Kerbel's Newest Picturebook
Prolific children's author Deborah Kerbel has written a number of picture books for young people, and this time she takes them to the deep blue to explore the fascinating life of an Octopus. In her ...
-
August 30, 2017
Humour and Children’s Books
I don’t think I was raised in a particularly funny family. My dad was often described as being extremely intelligent, but I don’t think I ever heard someone call him funny.Growing up, I recognized ...
-
September 22, 2017
Unsung Heroes of Literature: #Annoying: Fifteen Minutes with Hashtag
I caught up with Hashtag during the last days of the Toronto International Film Festival. While they weren’t promoting a film, Hashtag had swung through Toronto as a stop on his current twenty-seven ...
-
May 26, 2016
Rhubarb Crisp
By some trick of heredity, or upbringing, or brain chemistry, my greatest talent lies in finding the negative in what should be uniformly positive experiences. I'm generally on the hunt, when presented ...
-
March 07, 2016
Rethinking a Room of One’s Own
A room of one’s own, Virginia Woolf once famously wrote, is a necessary part of being able to write successfully for women, who could often not find such a thing, being loyal to a certain level of constant ...
-
September 02, 2015
On the Sensory Pleasures of Putting Pen to Paper
A few months ago, I lost a pen. A beautiful fountain pen with one of those squeezy ink chambers that you fill from an old-school inkpot. The pen had been a university graduation gift from my parents and ...
-
June 16, 2014
Got Any Good Lit Jokes?
Several years ago, I spoke at a gala dinner at a writers’ festival in Thunder Bay. Picture a hotel ballroom filled with about a hundred people seated at tables for ten. I had tried to inject some humourous ...