This returning event is a top pick for all writers aspiring, emerging, and established! Night Class is an interactive workshop offering writing tips and prompts across various genres, from instructors at UBC’s renowned School of Creative Writing. Learn key writing skills in five minutes or less from Ray Clark, Anosh Irani, Tanya Lloyd Kyi, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, and Bronwen Tate, as each instructor guides participants through a different concept and writing exercise. Night Class explores a wide array of styles and genres, from fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction to children’s literature and interactive storytelling. This workshop is suitable for writers of every experience level. Hosted by Tariq Hussain.
Presented in collaboration with UBC School of Creative Writing, and in partnership with Peliplat.
More information about the Festival:
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Event Participants:
RAY CLARK is an independent game developer, working primarily in story-driven video games, as well as in board games. Their work is published on itch.io.
TARIQ HUSSAIN is a Juno nominated songwriter and recording artist with a music career that spans over two decades. He is also a member of the critically acclaimed Vancouver band, Brasstronaut. The songs on Tariq’s latest solo offering feel a bit like short stories, hence the title, Telegrams (2019)—brief glimpses into fictional lives. Tariq is also a nonfiction writer and his essays on song-craft have appeared in the Walrus. He is currently working on a memoir about growing up as a first generation Canadian kid who dreams of playing in a rock n’ roll band.
ANOSH IRANI is a three-time Governor General’s Literary Award-shortlisted author and playwright, and a two-time winner of the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play. His novel, The Parcel, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and was chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, National Post, CBC Books and The Walrus. He is the recipient of the 2023 Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award.
TANYA LLOYD KYI is the author of more than 35 picture books, information books, and novels for children and young adults. Her newest release is The City of Lost Cats, the story of a girl and a clowder of cats who attempt to save a crumbling mansion.
ALEX MARZANO-LESNEVICH is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices Elle, the Prix des Libraires du Quebec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD. An assistant professor and the Rogers Communications Chair in Creative Nonfiction at UBC, Marzano-Lesnevich’s next book is the transgender and trans-genre memoir Both and Neither, forthcoming from Doubleday and publishers internationally.
BRONWEN TATE is the author of the poetry collection The Silk the Moths Ignore. She is an Associate Professor of Teaching and Undergraduate Chair in the School of Creative Writing at UBC, where she offers courses in poetry, creative nonfiction, creative writing pedagogy, creative process, and literary translation. A Practical Guide to Teaching Creating Writing: Supporting Inclusive Pedagogy, a collaboration with UBC colleague John Vigna, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic in Spring 2026.
