Write on! It’s the Vancouver International Writers Festival

Granville Island will be “booked” from Oct. 18 to Oct. 23 to host the Vancouver International Writers Festival.

In its 24th year running, the six-day festival attracts both Canadian and international authors — a mix of seasoned and up-and-coming— to connect with thousands of readers in intimate and interactive readings, panel discussions, performances and interviews.

Some of this year’s festival authors include:

Ian Rankin
Hailing from Scotland, Rankin is the UK’s top crime author who is best known for his novels featuring Inspector Rebus. The series has topped The Sunday Times bestseller lists and has been adapted into a TV series. His new novel, The Impossible Dead, revisits the character of Malcolm Fox from Rankin’s bestselling The Complaints.

Lev Grossman
American author and journalist Lev Grossman’s bestselling novel, The Magicians, combines mature themes and fantasy literature. The New York Timessaid the book “could crudely be labelled a Harry Potter for adults.”

Andrew Westoll
Westoll is an award-winning narrative journalist and a former monkey researcher who once lived in the rainforests of Suriname. He documented this five-month expedition in his travel-memoir, The Riverbones. His latest novel, The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, recounts his experience as a volunteer caregiver at a chimp house.

Madeleine Thien
Thien was the recent recipient of the Canadian Authors Association Air Canada Award, an award given to a promising Canadian writer under the age of 30, in recognition of her first book, Simple Recipes. The collection of short stories also received the Ethel Wilson fiction Prize. In addition, her novel, Certainty, won the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Ovid Festival Prize and was a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction. Her newest novel is Dogs at the Perimeter.

Charlotte Gill
British Columbia native Charlotte Gill is the author of the story collection Lady Killer, which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, winner of the Danuta Gleed Award and the B.C. Book Prize for Fiction. Her new memoir, Eating Dirt: Fields Notes on Deep Forests, Big Time and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe, is based on her experience working in the forests of Canada and planting more than a million trees.

In addition to the festival, there are plenty of special events worth checking out, including an appearance by Anthony Bourdain, who we featured on the cover of our most recent issue of Lifestyler. He will be at the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts, where he will be sharing stories from his bestselling book, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People who Cook on Oct. 29. Also, be sure to catch bestselling author, Chuck Palahniuk, known for Fight Club, who will be reading from his latest novel, Damned,at the Frederic Wood Theatre on Nov. 30.

For more details and ticket information, visit writersfest.bc.ca

— April Lim