THIS TICKET MUST BE REDEEMED AT THE FESTIVAL OFFICE FOR A PHYSICAL PASS UPON ARRIVAL FOR YOUR FIRST EVENT.

Admission to events 1-19. Please note that this pass does not include admission into Special Events. 

THIS TICKET MUST BE REDEEMED AT THE FESTIVAL OFFICE FOR A PHYSICAL PASS UPON ARRIVAL FOR YOUR FIRST EVENT.

Admission to events 2-7.  

Please note that this pass does not include admission into Special Events.

THIS TICKET MUST BE REDEEMED AT THE FESTIVAL OFFICE FOR A PHYSICAL PASS UPON ARRIVAL FOR YOUR FIRST EVENT.

Admission to events 8-13. Please note that this pass does not include admission into Special Events.

THIS TICKET MUST BE REDEEMED AT THE FESTIVAL OFFICE FOR A PHYSICAL PASS UPON ARRIVAL FOR YOUR FIRST EVENT.

Admission to events 14-19. Please note that this pass does not include admission into Special Events.

Betty Baxter’s memoir, Outspoken: A Journey from Olympic Athlete to Activist is a deeply personal account of her struggles against the discrimination, scrutiny, and systemic inequities she faced as a young elite level athlete and coach in 1970s and ’80s Canada, charting the beginnings of her activist path.

Betty Baxter was born in 1952 in Brooks, Alberta. Prior to turning thirty, she played Olympic volleyball and was one of the rare women to coach the sport internationally. She was a member of the National Advisory Council on Fitness and Amateur Sport (1977–79), a founder of Canadian Women & Sport (1981), and initiated the National Coaching School for Women (1987). Following her expulsion as Canada’s national coach in 1982, she became an outspoken activist for LGBTQ+ community and human rights. In 1993, she was the first open lesbian to seek federal office in Vancouver Centre, and in 2011 she was elected to her local school board, serving two terms. Her essay “Homophobia, Hypocrisy and Power Abuse” appeared in Playing It Forward 50 Years of Women and Sport in Canada, Second Story Press (2014) and she has published short non-fiction in online journals, Canadian Horse Journal and the anthology, Potato Soup Journal: Best of 2022.

She is grateful to live in xwésám (Roberts Creek, BC) on the unceded territories of the shíshálh people. She published her first book, the memoir Outspoken: A Journey from Olympic Athlete to Activist, in 2026.

Meticulous research, propulsive prose, intricately layered narratives and long-buried secrets that imperil their resilient female protagonists unite Janie Chang’s The Fourth Princess and Genevieve Graham’s The Chambermaid’s Key. Infused with extortion, murder and mysteries that echo across generations, these historical novels from two exceptional storytellers deliver gripping, unforgettable reads.

Janie Chang is a Globe and Mail bestselling author of historical fiction. Born in Taiwan, Chang has lived in the Philippines, Iran, Thailand, New Zealand, and Canada. Her novels often draw from family history and ancestral stories. She has a degree in computer science and is a graduate of the Writer’s Studio Program at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Three Souls, Dragon Springs Road, The Library of Legends, and The Porcelain Moon; and co-author of the USA Today bestseller The Phoenix Crown, with Kate Quinn. Her latest book is The Fourth Princess.

Genevieve Graham is the USA TODAY and #1 bestselling author of thirteen novels, including On Isabella Street, The Secret Keeper, The Forgotten Home Child, Letters Across the Sea, Bluebird, and The Chambermaid’s Key. She is passionate about breathing life back into history through tales of love and adventure. She lives in Alberta. Visit her on X and Instagram @GenGrahamAuthor.

The Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts is pleased to announce the Al and Eurithe Purdy BC Award for Excellence, an annual prize recognizing an outstanding book of fiction or non-fiction that is both authored and published in British Columbia. The prize is made possible through the generous support of Eurithe Purdy—in memory of her late husband, the great Canadian writer Al Purdy—and was created to honour his literary legacy and his ties to British Columbia. The $5,000 prize will be awarded to an author whose work shows literary merit, craft, originality, creativity and is rooted in BC’s cultural, historical or literary landscape. Starting in 2026, the award will be presented each year at the Festival of the Written Arts.

Please join us to celebrate the inaugural shortlist for the Al and Eurithe Purdy BC Award for Excellence. Three outstanding authors from British Columbia will be on hand to speak about and read from their shortlisted works, discuss the joys and challenges of publishing in BC, and share insights about the writing life and their literary craft.

Celebrated Cree author and Griffin Prize winner Billy-Ray Belcourt expands his bold, intimate body of work with Coexistence, stories of Indigenous love and loneliness, and The Idea of an Entire Life, poetry that explores queerness, grief, and the futures we dare imagine.

Billy-Ray Belcourt (he/him) is from the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta. He won the Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection This Wound is a World. He has twice been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award—once in poetry for the debut and in non-fiction for his memoir, A History of My Brief Body. Both his works of fiction, A Minor Chorus and Coexistence, were national bestsellers. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

In Tell It to the Water, Donna Morrissey crafts a voice-driven family memoir capturing the grief that engulfs her family after her mother’s death. Blending love, loss, and the fierce complexities of kinship, her Newfoundland storytelling is rich in character, humour and emotional truth.

Donna Morrissey is the author of the nationally bestselling memoir Pluck, which was a finalist for the Atlantic Book Awards’ Non-Fiction Award, and of seven acclaimed and bestselling novels, including the national bestseller Rage the Night. She won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Fiction for The Fortunate Brother; Sylvanus Now was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; and The Deception of Livvy Higgs was a One Read pick for Nova Scotia in 2017. Her fiction has also won awards in the US and the UK, and has been translated into several languages. Born and raised in Newfoundland, she lives in Halifax.

Two-time Stephen Leacock Medal winner, Terry Fallis returns with The Marionette, a comic thriller in which spy novelist James Norval is unexpectedly recruited by CSIS for a mission to Mali. Danger, high-stakes consequences and Fallis’s signature satirical wit follow.

Terry Fallis grew up in Toronto and earned an engineering degree from McMaster University. Drawn to politics at an early age, he worked for cabinet ministers in Ottawa and at Queen’s Park. His first novel, The Best Laid Plans, began as a podcast, then was self-published, won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, was re-published by McClelland & Stewart to great reviews, was crowned the 2011 winner of CBC’s Canada Reads as “the essential Canadian novel of the decade,” and was adapted as a CBC Television series and a stage musical. His next two novels, The High Road and Up and Down, were finalists for the Leacock Medal, and in 2015, he won the prize a second time, for his fourth book, No Relation. His other novels, Poles Apart (a Leacock Medal finalist), One Brother Shy, Albatross, Operation Angus, A New Season, and The Marionette, were all national bestsellers. A skilled public speaker, he lives in Toronto with his wife, and blogs on his website. Follow @TerryFallis on Twitter and subscribe to his newsletter on Substack. 

Over a decade-long, globe-spanning quest, Robert Moor sought the hidden wisdom of trees and discovered “tree-thinking,” a way of seeing shaped by patience and interconnection. With In Trees, he shows us how trees can guide us toward resilience, rootedness, and the art of living meaningfully.

Robert Moor is the bestselling author of On Trails and In Trees, and was hailed by The Wall Street Journal as a “philosopher on foot.” Translated into more than a dozen languages, On Trails garnered the National Outdoor Book Award, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and the William Saroyan International Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, New York magazine, Outside, Emergence, and n+1, among other publications. He lives in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia.

Two poets attuned to nature and language examine the forest, its role in our lives and our impact on it. In sometimes, forest, Elee Kraljii Gardiner explores the woods as mirror, companion and adversary, while in hiking beyond, bronwyn preece charts a personal and courageous journey through external and internal landscapes shaped by movement and attention.

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is a frequent collaborator with choreographers, musicians, sound and visual artists. She is the author of the poetry books sometimes, forest, Trauma Head, and serpentine loop and editor of the anthologies Against Death: 35 Essays on Living and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (with John Asfour) as well as nine anthologies from Thursdays Writing Collective, a program she founded with Downtown Eastside writers in 2008. Elee holds an MA in Hispanic Literature from University of British Columbia and an MFA in Poetry from Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the recipient of the Cogswell Award for Literary Excellence, Lina Chartrand Award for Social Justice and the Pandora’s Collective BC Writer Mentor Award. Her writing has been a finalist for the Souster Award, Kroetsch Award, bpNichol Chapbook Award, Best of the Net, City of Vancouver Book Award and in the US for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize and Montaigne Medal. Elee co-hosts the Whole Cloth reading series at University of British Columbia’s Green College with Dr. Bronwen Tate and also directs Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, an online international program pairing authors with mentors. She is the seventh Poet Laureate of Vancouver.

bronwyn preece is honoured to have the privilege of living on the unceded traditional territories of the L̓il̓wat7úl and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw Peoples in Whistler, BC. This awareness brings with it many levels of responsibility, humbleness, transparency and collaborative possibilities. She is a site-sensitive poetic-renegade and multi-disciplinary, community-engaged arts practitioner. She holds a PhD in Performance, along with a MA and BFA in Applied Theatre. She has taught and performed internationally. Her publications range from place-based children’s books, articles to artistic academic chapters. She is the author of knee deep in high water : riding the Muskwa-Kechika, expedition poems (Caitlin Press, 2023); Sea to Sky Alphabet (Simply Read Books, 2024); Gulf Islands Alphabet (Simply Read Books, 2012) and the forthcoming Olive and Jasper, Canadian Rockies Alphabet and My Happy Hiking Trails, all with Simply Read Books. All of her artistic and educational work aims towards cultivating place-based awarenesses and small acts of reconciliatory repair. bronwyn is an avid, solo, backcountry backpacker and hiker who writes on the trail. She has the word ‘gratitude’ tattooed on her arm.

Patrick Bird meets Dave Wakeland, both PIs, but one’s a naive rookie, the other a battle tested veteran, separated by over six decades and thousands of hard miles, yet cut from the same shadowed cloth. Join Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson and Sam Wiebe in conversation with Antonio Michael Downing as they delve into their new crime novels, Opposite Sully’s Gym and Guns Across the Water.

Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson is a writer living in Toronto. His novella, The Man Who Went Down Under, won the Black Orchid Novella Award and the Crime Writers of Canada Best Novella Award. His first novel, The Road to Heaven, was nominated for an Edgar Award and a Shamus Award. The second book in the Patrick Bird Mystery Series, Opposite Sully’s Gym, was published in March 2026.

Sam Wiebe is the author of the bestselling Ocean Drive as well as the Wakeland novels, one of the most authentic and acclaimed detective series in Canada, including Sunset and Jericho and The Last Exile. Guns Across the River is the latest in the series. His work has won the Crime Writers of Canada award, the Kobo Emerging Writers prize, and a silver medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and been shortlisted for the Edgar, Hammett, Shamus and City of Vancouver book prizes. The Last Exile is a finalist for the 2026 BC and Yukon Book Prizes’ Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Wiebe lives in New Westminster, BC. Visit samwiebe.com.

Antonio Michael Downing is the author of the acclaimed memoir Saga Boy and children’s book, Stars in My Crown. Antonio Michael is the current host of the CBC Radio program The Next Chapter where he discusses books with authors and columnists. He spends his time writing books, singing songs, and trying to make his grandma proud. Black Cherokee is his debut novel.

Author of Five Little Indians, Michelle Good returns with her highly anticipated second novel, Eliza Sunshine, a sweeping, intergenerational Cree family saga tracing three generations of women whose lives are shaped by colonial violence, resilience and the enduring power of story.

Michelle Good is a Cree writer and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After working for Indigenous organizations for twenty-five years, she obtained a law degree as a 43-year-old single mom and advocated for residential school survivors for over fourteen years. In 2014, Good earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia while still practising law and managing her own law firm. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada, and her poetry was included on two lists of the best Canadian poetry. Five Little Indians, her first novel, won the HarperCollins/UBC Best New Fiction Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Award, the Evergreen Award, the City of Vancouver Book Award, and Canada Reads 2022. It was also longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Award. Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous life in Canada was released in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Writers Trust Balsillie Prize for Public Policy, the Saskatchewan Book Awards and an Indigenous Voices Award, and was the winner of the High Plains Book Award. Good was inducted as a Member of the Order of Canada in 2025. Her highly anticipated new novel, to be released August 2026, is Eliza Sunshine.

In his memoir, The Road to Bard, Bard on the Beach founder Christopher Gaze recounts a life in the theatre, sharing vivid stories of acting, fundraising, leadership and community building, revealing with warmth and humour how a bold vision grew into one of Canada’s great theatre companies.

Christopher Gaze is best known as the Founder and Artistic Director of Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival, which celebrates its thirty-seventh season in 2026. He hosts the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s popular Tea & Trumpets series and also their annual Traditional Christmas concerts. Christopher plays a leading role in British Columbia as an advocate for the arts in general, and his passionate dedication to Bard on the Beach has fuelled its growth into one of the largest professional theatre companies in Canada, drawing a total of well over two million patrons since 1990. His many honours include Canada’s Meritorious Service Medal, Honorary Doctorates from UBC & SFU, the Mayor’s Arts Award for Theatre, the Order of British Columbia, and most recently, the King Charles III Coronation Medal. His memoir, The Road to Bard, will be released in 2026. 

Drawing on his decades of experience, Dr. Alika Lafontaine’s The Outrage Cure offers a groundbreaking exploration of how anger and betrayal deepen into outrage when we lose hope that change is possible, along with a compassionate guide to finding our way back, individually and together.

Alika Lafontaine, MD is an award-winning physician, innovator, public speaker, and one of Canada’s leading advocates for social change. He is an Associate Clinical Professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta and a rural anesthesiologist. Named Maclean’s top Health Care Innovator of 2023, Dr. Lafontaine was the first Indigenous doctor and the youngest physician to lead the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) in its 156-year history. With a mixed Indigenous ancestry of Metis, Oji-Cree and Pacific Islander, Dr. Lafontaine is a Canada’s Top 40 under 40 recipient, former host of the podcast, The Healthcare Divide, and Chairs the board of the Downie Wenjack Fund, a national charity focused on reconciliation.

Georgia Toews’s novel Nobody Asked for This follows 23-year-old comedian Virginia as she navigates grief, a collapsing friendship, and a date gone wrong. A rich, darkly comic, raw portrait of early adulthood, trauma and the limits of humour as a coping mechanism.

Georgia Toews is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Hey, Good Luck Out There. She is also a writer for film and television. Born and raised in Winnipeg, she now lives in Toronto.

Our New Voices authors offer powerful portraits of youth navigating upheaval and longing. Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho’s memoir The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street traces a Taiwanese-Canadian family fractured across continents, while Iryn Tushabe’s novel Everything Is Fine Here follows a Ugandan teen confronting her sister’s forbidden love—each illuminating profound resilience and hope. Event moderated by Megan Cole.

Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho has published short stories and personal essays in PRISM international, Ricepaper Magazine, River Teeth, Room and several anthologies, and was a finalist for the 2021 Jim Wong-Chu Award for Emerging Writers (presented by the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop). She lives in North Vancouver, BC, with her family. The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street is her first book.

Iryn Tushabe is a Ugandan Canadian writer and journalist living on Treaty 4 territory in Regina, Saskatchewan. Most recently her nonfiction has appeared in Literary Hub, The Walrus and in the trace press anthology river in an ocean: essays on translation. Her short fiction has been anthologized in The Journey Prize Stories volumes 30 and 33. She was a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2021 and is a 2023 winner of the Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. Everything is Fine Here is her debut novel.

Beloved comedian and author Charles Demers brings us The Eh Team: A Celebration of Canadianisms from Elbows Up to Poutine, a laugh out loud guide to the quirks and charm of our uniquely Canadian foods, expressions and turns of phrase that define who we are.

Charles Demers is a stand-up comedian, author, playwright, speechwriter, and voice actor. With over sixty appearances as a writer-performer on CBC radio’s The Debaters, he is a touring headliner whose first stand-up album Fatherland, from 604 Records, was nominated for the 2018 Juno for Best Comedy Album. He is the author of three plays and seven books, including the crime satire Property Values, which was optioned by Pioneer Pictures of Los Angeles and for which he co-wrote the screen adaptation. He is a former lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, and the editor-curator of Robin’s Egg Books. He has opened for Sarah Silverman, Bob Odenkirk, and Marc Maron, also appearing as a featured guest on the latter’s popular podcast WTF. He also provides the voice of “Poutine” on Will Arnett’s patriotic superhero send-up Super Team Canada. Demers lives in East Vancouver with his wife, their two children, and a dog. His most recent book is The Eh Team.

In his coming-of-age debut novel Black Cherokee, The Next Chapter host Antonio Michael Downing introduces Ophelia Blue Rivers—“half Black, half Cherokee, and all mixed up”—a young woman searching for belonging in a landscape fractured by generations of social and racial divides.

Antonio Michael Downing is the author of the acclaimed memoir Saga Boy and children’s book, Stars in My Crown. Antonio Michael is the current host of the CBC Radio program The Next Chapter where he discusses books with authors and columnists. He spends his time writing books, singing songs, and trying to make his grandma proud. Black Cherokee is his debut novel.

Bestselling Cree-Scottish author Monique Gray Smith returns with Sharing the Light, a quietly profound collection of stories, vignettes and reflections that invites readers to cultivate gratitude, love, joy and hope while moving through a world that is both changing and challenging.

Monique Gray Smith is an award-winning, bestselling author of books for children and adults, as well as an accomplished international speaker and consultant. Of Cree and Scottish descent, she has been sober and on her healing journey for more than thirty-four years. Her debut novel, Tilly: A Story of Hope and Resilience, won the 2014 Burt Award for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Literature. Monique Gray Smith and her family are blessed to live on the traditional territory of the WSÁNEĆ people near Victoria, British Columbia. Her new book, an instant #1 Canadian bestseller, is called Sharing the Light.

Individually, Barney Bentall, Tom Taylor, and Shari Ulrich are accomplished, acclaimed, award-winning musicians. Together, they become a powerhouse trio of talent whose music melds folk, roots and acoustic singer songwriter traditions into something warm, intimate and deeply human. Their blend of acoustic guitars, mandolin, fiddle and swoon-worthy three-part harmonies—along with a palpable love of playing together—offers an inspiring close to this year’s Festival.

Barney Bentall, Tom Taylor and Shari Ulrich first played together in November 2007 at a songwriter concert on Bowen Island. Their continued collaboration grew from the undeniable enjoyment for both the artists and their audiences. They soon after released “Live at Cates Hill”: an eclectic mix of the character, voices and songwriting talents of these three unique artists.

With juggling all their respective projects it took until the summer of 2015 to embark on recording a second album , “Tightrope Walk”, released by Borealis Records. With Shari’s daughter, Julia Graff, and partner, James Perrella, engineering, they set up camp in Barney’s house and created an album, of which all involved were exceedingly proud.

Barney, Shari and Tom all engaged in active solo careers and recordings, the trio gets together for a run of shows as often as possible, always bringing new tunes to the table to work up as only BTU can. Their blend of acoustic guitars, mandolin, fiddle and swoon-worthy three-part harmonies along with their obvious love of performing together is enduring and inspiring.    

Join crime writer Sam Wiebe for a workshop on dialogue. He'll discuss the difference between dialogue and real-life speech; how dialogue relates to character, pacing, voice, and plot; and why characters say one thing and mean another (even if they don't know it). 

 This event is located in the Rockwood Lodge Art Space. Space is limited. Please contact the festival office prior to August 13th if you have accessibility or special seating needs. 

Sam Wiebe is the author of the bestselling Ocean Drive as well as the Wakeland novels, one of the most authentic and acclaimed detective series in Canada, including Sunset and Jericho and The Last Exile. Guns Across the River is the latest in the series. His work has won the Crime Writers of Canada award, the Kobo Emerging Writers prize, and a silver medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and been shortlisted for the Edgar, Hammett, Shamus and City of Vancouver book prizes. The Last Exile is a finalist for the 2026 BC and Yukon Book Prizes’ Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Wiebe lives in New Westminster, BC. Visit samwiebe.com.

Please note that this ticket does not include admission into the rest of the festival.