Search
-
October 04, 2016Governor General's Literary Award Nominees Announced with More Good News for Madeleine Thien!
2016 marks the staggering 80th anniversary of the Governor General's Literary Awards. The shortlists, announced today, are interesting ones this year, with the fiction list especially notable for its ...
-
December 05, 2017Take a Tour of Award-Nominated Author Carrie Snyder's Writing Space
Cliffy is excited to tell his parents it is pajama day at school. He loves getting to wear his comfy footy pajamas all day long. The only catch? It's not actually pajama day at all - but the busy and ...
-
October 30, 2018Independent Publishers Win Big at the 2018 Governor General's Literary Awards
It was a great year for independent presses at the 2018 Governor General's Literary Awards. The seven English language awards (along with their French counterparts) were announced yesterday, with six ...
-
July 30, 2018Curator Jocelyn Piirainen on the AGO's Tunirrusiangit, featuring Iconic Inuit Artists Kenojuak Ashevak & Tim Pitsiulak
This summer, the Art Gallery of Ontario is celebrating two extraordinary Inuit artists: Kenojuak Ashevak and her nephew Timootee (Tim) Pitsiulak. The exhibition, Tunirrusiangit: Kenojuak Ashevak ...
-
November 22, 2018Calling All Aspiring Authors: Never Ask an Illustrator to Illustrate Your Picture Book for Free
A few weeks ago, I was in a local tavern with some friends—a few of them are professional illustrators. They were drinking overpriced mocktails and commiserating about the emails they get from aspiring ...
-
February 01, 2019Doctor Gretchen Roedde on Her Journey to Expand Healthcare in Remote Ontario Communities
Remote communities in Canada often suffer from a lack medical resources, making illness and injury even more complicated and difficult than it would otherwise be. It's an issue that became a driving force ...
-
May 02, 2019Facing the Double-Headed Dragon: Perfectionism and Fear
Guys. My last few weeks have been bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. I am feeling a bit overwhelmed, so I hope you will all bear with me this month. There may be some punctuation errors here and there. Even a typo ...
-
January 18, 2019Yard Dog author A.G. Pasquella on Keeping the Rawness from Draft to Draft (and a Tattoo Suggestion)
Sometimes getting the thing you want most doesn't quite work out. That's what Jack Palace discovers in A.G. Pasquella's gritty new thriller Yard Dog (Dundurn Press). When Jack gets out of prison, it ...
-
September 10, 2019
On Reading
Writers need to read— I offered this advice earlier in the summer— and I sincerely hope it’s not news to any writer looking at this post that reading is a most instructive way to learn what does, ...
-
August 31, 2018On the future of Canlit
You guys, this is my last Open Book column.I have been writing this column for a year now and I’ll admit I didn’t know what I was going to write about when Holly Kent and Kevin Hardcastle asked me ...