Q&A 2024

Brandi Bird is an Indigiqueer Saulteaux, Cree, and Métis writer from Treaty 1 territory. They currently live and learn on the land of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh & Musqueam peoples. Bird works as a freelance writer, workshop facilitator, and manuscript consultant. They are currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia […]

Katłı̨̀ą is a northern Dene woman who spends her time between her ancestral homelands in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories and Lekwungen speaking people’s Coast Salish Territory. She recently published her fourth novel, Firekeeper. She is a mother, grandmother and articling lawyer. Katłı̨̀ą’s forthcoming work, Mother Earth is our Elder, is a non-fiction collection based on interviews with […]

Pauline Holdstock is an award-winning novelist, short fiction writer, and essayist with books published internationally. In Canada, her work has been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and others, and has won the BC Book Prizes Award for Fiction and the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize. Pauline is taking part […]

Maia Caron is a Vancouver Island-based Indigenous writer and author of Song of Batoche, a historical novel that was a CBC must-read book for 2018. The Toronto Star described the novel as a “tale of love, betrayal and obsession,” and Shelagh Rogers of The Last Chapter said it was an “ambitious, broad, sweeping, historical mystery.” The Last Secret is a sweeping, […]

Danny Ramadan is a Lambda-award winning Syrian-Canadian author. His novels, The Clothesline Swing and The Foghorn Echoes continue to receive accolades. His award-winning children’s books The Salma Series continues to grow. Ramadan has raised over $300,000 for LGBTQ+ refugees. His memoir, Crooked Teeth, came out in the summer of 2024. “Writing this memoir is a […]

Tunnel Island, Bill Gaston‘s eighth fiction collection, appears next Spring. Others—Mount Appetite, Gargoyles, Juliet Was a Surprise, Mariner’s Guide to Self Sabotage—have won or been short listed for the Governor General’s, Giller, BC and Victoria Book Prizes. He has also written novels, memoir and drama. He lives with writer Dede Crane on Gabriola Island. Bill […]

In connection with the annual Victoria Festival of Authors taking place October 16 to 20, 2024, Plenitude book reviews editor Shawn Syms interviews Cody Caetano, author of the best-selling 2022 memoir Half-Bads in White Regalia, which was long-listed for Canada Reads and received an Indigenous Voices Award for Best Published Prose. Caetano, who is of […]

Jen Currin‘s new collection of stories is Disembark, published by House of Anansi. Their collection Hider/Seeker: Stories won a Canadian Independent Book Award, was a finalist for a ReLit Award, and was named a 2018 Globe and Mail Best Book. They have also published five collections of poetry, most recently Trinity Street (Anansi, 2023); The […]

Zehra Naqvi is a Karachi-born writer raised on unceded Coast Salish Territories (Vancouver, B.C.). She is a winner of the 2021 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She also won Room’s 2016 Poetry Contest. She holds two MSc degrees from Oxford University where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.  The Knot of My Tongue: […]

Shashi Bhat has written three books of fiction, most recently the story collection Death by a Thousand Cuts. Her novel-in-stories, The Most Precious Substance on Earth, was a finalist for the 2022 Governor General’s Award for fiction. She is the editor of EVENT and teaches creative writing at Douglas College. Death by a Thousand Cuts is breathtaking collection […]

Corinna Chong‘s first novel, Belinda’s Rings, was published by NeWest Press in 2013. Her debut short story collection, The Whole Animal, and her second novel, Bad Land, were published by Arsenal Pulp Press. She lives in Kelowna, B.C., where she is an English and Fine Arts Professor at Okanagan College. The Whole Animal is a bold, dark, and […]