Vancouver World City of Literature - The Association of Book ...

authors
Vancouver and British Columbia are home to a dynamic and diverse community of writers,
including indigenous authors, those writing from a Euro-Canadian tradition, and
immigrant authors who have come to BC from around the world. Among Canadian
provinces, British Columbia is second only to Ontario (a province with roughly three times
the population of BC) in its number of resident-authors and is the only region of the
country to host its own branch office of The Writers’ Union of Canada.
Vancouver and the surrounding area is rich with writers who are producing work in a wide
variety of genres: literary non-fiction, fiction, children’s books, regional titles, natural history,
poetry, illustrated books, and more. The work of Vancouver’s authors in these genres has had
a profound influence on Canada’s national literature, and on Canadians’ understanding of
themselves as well as the perception of Canada abroad.
“...a dynamic and diverse community of writers...”
Top row, left to right:
Pauline Johnson, Earle
Birney, Hubert Evans,
George Clutsei, Emily
Carr, Milton Acorn,
Joy Kogawa, Patrick
Lane; bottom row, left
to right: John Vaillant,
Margaret Ormsby,
Al Purdy, George
Woodcock, Jeanette
Armstrong, Douglas
Coupland, Roderick
Haig-Brown
Vancouver launched itself as a major centre for poetry in the 1960s, and some of the Canada’s
most established poets—Al Purdy, Earle Birney, Dorothy Livesay, bill bissett, Pat Lowther,
Lorna Crozier, Robert Swanson, Susan Musgrave, Patrick Lane, Kate Braid—have lived,
or live currently, in and around the city. As well, a tribe of younger, cutting-edge poets
has taken root here, with the likes of Lisa Robertson, Elizabeth Bachinsky, and Evelyn
Lau. And Vancouver—home to internationally acclaimed slam poet Shane Koyczan—is
lively with slam poetry celebrations and events every night of the week (including Canada’s
longest-running poetry slam, which happens every Monday night in Vancouver’s east
side). In 2006, Vancouver appointed its first Poet Laureate, George McWhirter, who in
April 2009, published A Verse Map of Vancouver, an innovative anthology of poetry that
celebrates the streets of Vancouver. Vancouver’s second Poet Laureate, Brad Cran, will focus
attention on bringing poetry into Vancouver’s schools. In another notable first, BC poet
George Bowering was named Canada’s inaugural Parliamentary Poet Laureate in 2002.
chapter three: the literary city
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