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2021 FESTIVAL: OCTOBER 18 - 24
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2021 Festival: October 18-24

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Articles

What We’re Reading

What We’re Reading: Lust, Caution and Other Stories

I am a Beijinger through and through, yet my ancestral home is in southern China. The Chinese government usually defines a citizen’s roots through their patrilineal line, of which my national identification would list Shanghai.

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What We’re Reading: Dance on the Volcano

For Black History Month, I signed up for one of the best newsletters to ever grace my inbox–28 Days of Black History.

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Recent News

  • Youth Book Corner: National Poetry Month
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  • What We’re Reading: Lust, Caution and Other Stories

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Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut memoir opens with a t Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. From there, it expands to encompass the big and broken world around him, in all its complexity and contradictions: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it, first loves and first loves lost, sexual exploration and intimacy, and the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. ⠀
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What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.⠀
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Hear Billy-Ray Belcourt, a 2021 finalist for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes' Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes, speak tomorrow (April 14) as part of Incite. This free event starts at 7pm PT. Register at the link in our bio!
Congratulations to Benjamin Perrin for Overdose: H Congratulations to Benjamin Perrin for Overdose: Heartbreak and Hope in Canada’s Opioid Crisis's nomination for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes (as part of the BC and Yukon Book Prizes)!⠀
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Benjamin Perrin is a professor at the University of British Columbia, Peter A. Allard School of Law. He served as a law clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada, and was the lead justice and public safety advisor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper from 2012-13. Professor Perrin is the author of two previous books: Invisible Chains: Canada’s Underground World of Human Trafficking, which was a national bestseller and named one of the top books of the year by The Globe and Mail, and Victim Law: The Law of Victims of Crime in Canada. He lives in Vancouver, BC.⠀
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Hear from all of the 2021 finalists for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes tomorrow (April 14) as part of Incite. This free event starts at 7pm PT. Register at the link in our bio!
Over the last decade and a half, business leaders, Over the last decade and a half, business leaders, Silicon Valley executives, and the Davos elite have been calling for a new kind of capitalism. The writing was on the wall. With income inequality soaring, wages stagnating, and a climate crisis escalating, it was no longer viable to justify harming the environment and ducking taxes in the name of shareholder value. Business leaders realized that to get out in front of these problems, they had to make social and environmental values the very core of their messaging. Their essential pitch was: Who could be better suited to address major societal issues than efficiently run corporations? There is just one small problem with their doing well by doing good pitch. Corporations are still, ultimately, answerable to their shareholders, and doing well always comes first.⠀
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This essential truth lies at the heart of Joel Bakan’s argument. In lucid and engaging prose, Bakan lays bare a litany of immoral corporate actions and documents corporate power grabs dressed up as social initiatives. He makes clear the urgency of the problem of the corporatization of society itself and shows how people are fighting back and making gains on a grassroots level.⠀
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Hear Joel Bakan, a 2021 finalist for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes' Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes, speak this Wednesday (April 14) as part of Incite. This free event starts at 7pm PT. Register at the link in our bio!
Congratulations to Billy-Ray Belcourt for A Histor Congratulations to Billy-Ray Belcourt for A History of My Brief Body's nomination for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes (as part of the BC and Yukon Book Prizes)!⠀
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Billy-Ray Belcourt (he/him) is a writer and scholar from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound Is a World, which was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. His second book of poetry, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, was longlisted for Canada Reads 2020. A recipient of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and an Indspire Award, Belcourt is Assistant Professor of Indigenous Creative Writing at UBC.⠀
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Hear from all of the 2021 finalists for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes this Wednesday (April 14) as part of Incite. This free event starts at 7pm PT. Register at the link in our bio!
North America is in the middle of a health emergen North America is in the middle of a health emergency. Life expectancies are declining. Someone is dying every two hours in Canada from illicit drug overdose. Fentanyl has become a looming presence—an opioid more powerful, pervasive, and deadly than any previous street drug.⠀
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The victims are many—and often not whom we might expect. They include the poor and forgotten but also our neighbours: professionals, students, and parents. Despite the thousands of deaths, these victims have remained largely invisible.⠀
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Benjamin Perrin, a law and policy expert, shines a light in this darkest of corners—and his findings challenge many assumptions about the crisis. Why do people use drugs despite the risk of overdosing? Can we crack down on the fentanyl supply? Do supervised consumption sites and providing “safe drugs” enable the problem? Which treatments work? Would decriminalizing all drugs help or do further harm?⠀
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Hear Benjamin Perrin, a 2021 finalist for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes' Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes, speak this Wednesday (April 14) as part of Incite. This free event starts at 7pm PT. Register at the link in our bio!
Congratulations to Amber Dawn for My Art Is Killin Congratulations to Amber Dawn for My Art Is Killing Me's nomination for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes (as part of the BC and Yukon Book Prizes)!⠀
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Amber Dawn is the author of the novels Sodom Road Exit (2018) and Sub Rosa (winner of a Lambda Literary Award, 2010), the Vancouver Book Award-winning memoir How Poetry Saved My Life (2013), and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize-nominated poetry collection Where the words end and my body begins (2015). She is also editor of Fist of the Spider Woman: Tales of Fear and Queer Desire and co-editor of Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry and With a Rough Tongue. Her most recent book is My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems. She teaches creative writing at Douglas College in Vancouver, and also leads several low-barrier community writing classes.⠀
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Hear from all of the 2021 finalists for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes this Wednesday (April 14) as part of Incite. This free event starts at 7pm PT. Register at the link in our bio!
Taken from their families when they are very small Taken from their families when they are very small and sent to a remote, church-run residential school, Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie are barely out of childhood when they are finally released after years of detention.⠀
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Alone and without any skills, support or families, the teens find their way to the seedy and foreign world of Downtown Eastside Vancouver, where they cling together, striving to find a place of safety and belonging in a world that doesn’t want them. The paths of the five friends cross and crisscross over the decades as they struggle to overcome, or at least forget, the trauma they endured during their years at the Mission.⠀
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Fuelled by rage and furious with God, Clara finds her way into the dangerous, highly charged world of the American Indian Movement. Maisie internalizes her pain and continually places herself in dangerous situations. Famous for his daring escapes from the school, Kenny can’t stop running and moves restlessly from job to job—through fishing grounds, orchards and logging camps—trying to outrun his memories and his addiction. Lucy finds peace in motherhood and nurtures a secret compulsive disorder as she waits for Kenny to return to the life they once hoped to share together. After almost beating one of his tormentors to death, Howie serves time in prison, then tries once again to re-enter society and begin life anew.⠀
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With compassion and insight, Five Little Indians chronicles the desperate quest of these residential school survivors to come to terms with their past and, ultimately, find a way forward.⠀
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Hear Michelle Good, a 2021 finalist for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes' Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes, speak this Wednesday (April 14) as part of Incite. This free event starts at 7pm PT. Register at the link in our bio!
Congratulations to Joel Bakan for The New Corporat Congratulations to Joel Bakan for The New Corporation: How “Good” Corporations Are Bad for Democracy's nomination for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes (as part of the BC and Yukon Book Prizes)!⠀
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Joel Bakan is an internationally recognized and award-winning scholar and teacher who has worked on landmark legal cases and government policies. His bestselling book The Corporation was made into an award-winning documentary. He lives in Vancouver.⠀
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Hear from all of the 2021 finalists for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes this Wednesday (April 14) as part of Incite. This free event starts at 7pm PT. Register at the link in our bio!

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We are grateful to live, create and work on the unceded ancestral and living territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) people.

All material © Vancouver Writers Fest 2021