36 Wild West

Marina Endicott Alberta	Pauline Holdstock British Columbia	Guy Vanderhaeghe Saskatchewan
Rudy Wiebe Alberta

Marina Endicott, Alberta

Marina Endicott was born in British Columbia, and grew up in Nova Scotia and Ontario. Her first novel, Open Arms, was nominated for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award in 2002, and her long poem “The Policeman’s Wife, Some Letters” was shortlisted for the national cbc Literary Awards in 2006. Read more

Pauline Holdstock, British Columbia

Pauline Holdstock’s novel Beyond Measure was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Caribbean and Canada region) and the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize, and it won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Holdstock’s other novels include The Blackbird’s Song, which was nominated for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, The Turning and The Burial Ground. She lives on Vancouver Island. Her new novel is Into the Heart of the Country. Read more

Guy Vanderhaeghe, Saskatchewan

Guy Vanderhaeghe is the author of four previous novels: My Present Age, Homesick, The Englishman’s Boy, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and The Last Crossing, a regional finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and winner of cbc’s Canada Reads 2004. He has also published three collections of short stories: Man Descending, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Faber Prize in the UK, The Trouble with Heroes and Things as They Are. Read more

Rudy Wiebe, Alberta

Rudy Wiebe has been entertaining, educating and inspiring readers with award-winning novels, short stories, essays, memoirs, histories and screenplays for more than 50 years. Wiebe received the Governor General’s Award for fiction in 1973 for The Temptations of Big Bear and again, in 1994, for A Discovery of Strangers. In 2007, he won the Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction for his memoir, Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest. Wiebe is an Officer of the Order of Canada. Read more

Host: Andreas Schroeder
Thursday, October 20, 2011 - 8:00pm
Waterfront Theatre
$19

While the “Wild West” may bring to mind visions of sagebrush and shootouts fostered by Hollywood, the Wild West in Canada is a different experience altogether, rich in history, myth and great characters. For more than 50 years, celebrated author Rudy Wiebe has been writing about the West, portraying encounters between explorers and Aboriginal peoples, beauty and depravation. Guy Vanderhaeghe, Pauline Holdstock and Marina Endicott take the prairies as a pivotal setting that forms and develops characters in their new novels. Is there something about flat land and big sky that can define and refine individual experience? These are chroniclers of the West who are shaping how the world will see Canadian history in the decades to come.

Tickets are still available and can be purchased at the door 45 minutes before the event begins.

36 Wild West

2011 Festival