Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts

06/20/2026

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 is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Hey, Good Luck Out There. She is also a writer for film and television.

Georgia joins the 44th Sunshine Coast Festival of Written Arts on August 16 at 10:00 a.m. Buy your tickets for this event and more on our website.

06/19/2026

Award-winning author and cartoonist Sarah Leavitt is offering a free comics workshop through UBC School of Creative Writing on June 24! We were honoured to feature Sarah Leavitt (with fellow author Teresa Wong) at the 2025 Festival of the Written Arts for a fantastic event highlighting their stellar graphic novels. If you are comics-curious you will definitely want to sign up!

🎨 ✏️ Join us for a free comics workshop with professor Sarah Leavitt, just back from the Cannes Festival, where the animation based on her comic Tangles had its world premiere.

This is your chance to experience the teaching approach of our new Continuing Education course, Comics Class for Writers, and ask any questions you have about the full course before enrolling!

In this workshop “Create your comics memoir”, you’ll experiment with shapes, lines, colour, and words, to convey information and emotion in a four-panel bite-sized comic. Don’t worry about whether you “can draw” or not – comics are about much more than that. Beginners welcomed and celebrated; sharing your work is always optional.

📍Follow the registration link and reserve your spot! https://creativewriting.ubc.ca/comics-class-for-writers-workshop/

06/17/2026

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 is a Cree writer and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. 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 debut 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.

Michelle joins the 44th Sunshine Coast Festival of Written Arts on August 15 at 3:30 p.m. Buy your tickets for this event and more on our website.

06/15/2026

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.

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.

Billy-Ray joins the 44th Sunshine Coast Festival of Written Arts on August 14 at 3:30pm. Buy your tickets for this event and more on our website.

06/14/2026

This year’s Rockwood Lecture features a powerful voice on healing and change. ✨ 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.

Dr. Lafontaine 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. 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.

The 44th annual Rockwood Lecture kicks off with Dr. Lafontaine on August 15 at 8:00 p.m. Buy your tickets now on our website.

06/13/2026

In his coming-of-age debut novel Black Cherokee, author 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 is also the author of the acclaimed memoir Saga Boy and children’s book, Stars in My Crown. He 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.

Antonio joins the 44th Sunshine Coast Festival of Written Arts on August 16 at 3:00 p.m. Buy your tickets for this event and more on our website.

06/12/2026

The Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts is a proud sponsor of Coast Shakespeare's production of As You Like It!🎭 Performances take place in the Rockwood Pavilion on July 3, 4, 10 & 11, with a special preview show on July 2nd. All proceeds raised go to the Bev Shaw Literacy Fund held at the Sunshine Coast Foundation. Tickets are on sale now at https://coastshakespeare.ca/
Driftwood Players Present, Coast Shakespeare

🎭Get your tickets now for Coast Shakespeare’s As You Like It at Rockwood Pavilion, July 2–11! https://buytickets.at/coastshakespeare 🌿 Romance, disguises, wit & unforgettable characters await in the Forest of Arden! Proceeds from the show support the Bev Shaw Literacy Fund. 📲 Follow us on Facebook & Instagram for behind-the-scenes fun!

06/11/2026

The Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts is pleased to announce the finalists for the inaugural Al and Eurithe Purdy BC Award for Excellence! You can learn about these fine books and meet the shortlisted authors--George Abbott, Sage Birchwater and Sarah Louise Butler--on Friday, August 14, at 2:00 pm at our BC Books Showcase event, moderated by Kathryn Gretsinger (Event #4).

We are incredibly honoured to have been chosen by Eurithe Purdy to be the administrator for this new literary award, which celebrates an outstanding BC-published and BC-authored book each year. For more information, visit https://writersfestival.ca/2026/shortlist-announced-for-the-inaugural-al-and-eurithe-purdy-bc-award-for-excellence/

06/10/2026

Prepare to be inspired by the emerging voices redefining Canadian literature. 📚 Our New Voices authors this year 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 book illuminating profound resilience and hope. This event will be moderated by author 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).

Iryn Tushabe is a Ugandan Canadian writer and journalist living on Treaty 4 territory in Regina, Saskatchewan.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.

Wiley and Iryn join the 44th Sunshine Coast Festival of Written Arts on August 16 at 11:30 a.m. Buy your tickets for this event and more on our website.

06/07/2026

Two-time Stephen Leacock Medal winner Terry Fallis returns to the 44th annual Sunshine Coast Festival for the Written Arts with The Marionette, a comic thriller featuring Fallis’s signature satirical wit.

This story follows spy novelist James Norval who is unexpectedly recruited by CSIS for a mission to Mali with dangerous, high-stakes consequences. His other novels, Poles Apart (a Leacock Medal finalist), One Brother Shy, Albatross, Operation Angus, and A New Season, were all national bestsellers.

Terry joins the festival on August 14 at 8:00 p.m. Buy your tickets for this event and more on our website.