Festival Reading List
October 20–26, 2025
The Reading List represents over 115 authors who will be joining us at our flagship Festival, taking place this year from October 20–26 (along with some extraordinary fall Special Events). Granville Island will transform into Vancouver’s biggest book club, featuring immersive conversations and storytelling from some of the world’s most compelling authors.
Click the button below to dive into the interactive list! Search by title or author, filter by genre, or peruse the full list. Click on any book cover to learn more about the book and author. You can also view an interactive list of all authors.
If you would prefer to access a simple text version of the Reading List, you can download it as a Word Doc.
New Additions
The Reading List is updated regularly with new additions—check back frequently or subscribe to our newsletter for updates!
Regrets:
- Liars by Sarah Manguso – added July 18
- Dayo by Marc Perez – added July 18
- Ducks by Kate Beaton – added July 18
- NMLCT: Poems by Paul Vermeersch – added July 14
- allostatic load by Junie Désil – added July 14
- California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature by John Freeman – added July 14
- The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai – added July 14
- Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future by Vince Beiser – added July 11
- Together, a Forest: Drawing Connections Between Nature’s Diversity and Our Own by Roz MacLean – added July 11
- Wînipêk: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre by Niigaan Sinclair – added July 10
- On Tyranny Graphic Edition: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder – added July 10
- Rock Star: My Life On and Off the Ice by Jennifer Jones – added July 10
- Reconciling: A Lifelong Struggle to Belong by Larry Grant and Scott Steedman – added July 4
- Vitality by Carol Lee, Susanna Ng and Ramona Mar – added July 3
- Nuts About Scaredy Squirrel by Melanie Watt – added July 3
- Everything Is Fine Here by Iryn Tushabe – added July 3
- The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia – added July 3
- For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising by Nilo Tabrizy and Fatemeh Jamalpour – added June 27
- From the Rez to the Runway: Forging My Path in Fashion by Christian Allaire – added June 27
- The Threads of Time by Coltrane Seesequasis – added June 27
- Messy Perfect by Tanya Boteju – added June 27
2025 Guest Curator
The brilliant, multi-award-winning poet and novelist CANISIA LUBRIN joins VWF 2025 as our Guest Curator. Last year, many patrons told us that Canisia’s Code Noir event was possibly the best of the Festival. Since then, that novel has gone on to win the Carol Shields Prize and the Danuta Gleed Award, and to be honoured with multiple other nominations. This year, Canisia returns with a new collection of poetry, The World After Rain (her first since the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize win for The Dyzgraphxst).
Canisia has curated five events for the October Festival, in a program she’s calling Cycling and Renewal for the Earth. With events for both youth and adults, focusing on verse, storytelling, and transformation, you won’t want to miss this lineup.
Official Bookseller
These books are available from our Official Bookseller Book Warehouse, a division of Black Bond Books.
Looking for audiobooks? Check out our 2025 Festival Playlist on Libro.fm. Sign up for a Libro.fm account in support of the Vancouver Writers Fest, and a portion of the sales for every book you purchase will be shared with us!