Denman Island Readers & Writers Festival

10/07/2026

STILL A HAND-FULL OF TICKETS FOR THE AFTERNOON EVENT AVAILABLE...

A Special Afternoon with Wade Davis

NEW SECOND EVENT WITH WADE DAVIS

Tuesday, October 13 • 1:00 pm to 3:00pm • Denman Hall

By popular demand, we are delighted to announce a second Wade Davis event on Denman Island.

In addition to his 6:30 pm evening presentation, Wade will join us earlier that afternoon at 1:00pm for a different conversation... one rooted closer to home.

North Star: Reflections on Canada and Being Canadian

Drawing on his newly released book, North Star: Reflections on Canada and Being Canadian, and on decades of writing about British Columbia, Wade Davis will reflect on place, culture, Indigenous knowledge, ecological richness and what it means to care for the country we call home.

Anthropologist. Ethnobotanist. Explorer. Photographer. Writer. Storyteller.

For more than four decades, Wade has travelled through some of the world’s most culturally and ecologically extraordinary places. But some of his deepest writing has also been about Canada and British Columbia: their landscapes, peoples, histories and responsibilities.

The afternoon will open with a new five-minute film from Pacific Wild about Pacific herring in the Salish Sea and the W̱SÁNEĆ heredity chiefs' challenge to federal herring-fishery management. A portion of the proceeds from this event will be donated to support the W̱SÁNEĆ legal challenge.

From there, Wade will lead us into a wider conversation about Indigenous rights and knowledge, conservation, biodiversity, the future of the coast, and our relationship to the places we call home.

It will be a distinctly different presentation from Wade’s evening event, which will range more widely across his extraordinary international experiences, stories and travels.

Wade Davis: North Star

Tuesday, October 13 • 1:00 pm
Denman Hall

NEW SECOND EVENT — TICKETS NOW AVAILABLE

PURCHASE TICKETS https://denmanislandwritersfestival.com/

For those already joining us in the evening, the afternoon offers an opportunity to hear another side of Wade Davis: a conversation centred on Canada, British Columbia and the coast we share.

And for those who were unable to get tickets to the evening presentation, this is a new opportunity to see Wade Davis on Denman Island.

We hope you’ll join us.

Denman Island Readers & Writers Festival

09/29/2026

A Special Afternoon with Wade Davis

NEW SECOND EVENT WITH WADE DAVIS
Tuesday, October 13 • 1:00 pm to 3:00pm • Denman Hall
By popular demand, we are delighted to announce a second Wade Davis event on Denman Island.

In addition to his 6:30 pm evening presentation, Wade will join us earlier that afternoon at 1:00pm for a different conversation... one rooted closer to home.

North Star: Reflections on Canada and Being Canadian
Drawing on his newly released book, North Star: Reflections on Canada and Being Canadian, and on decades of writing about British Columbia, Wade Davis will reflect on place, culture, Indigenous knowledge, ecological richness and what it means to care for the country we call home.

Anthropologist. Ethnobotanist. Explorer. Photographer. Writer. Storyteller.

For more than four decades, Wade has travelled through some of the world’s most culturally and ecologically extraordinary places. But some of his deepest writing has also been about Canada and British Columbia: their landscapes, peoples, histories and responsibilities.

The afternoon will open with a new five-minute film from Pacific Wild about Pacific herring in the Salish Sea and the W̱SÁNEĆ heredity chiefs' challenge to federal herring-fishery management. A portion of the proceeds from this event will be donated to support the W̱SÁNEĆ legal challenge.

From there, Wade will lead us into a wider conversation about Indigenous rights and knowledge, conservation, biodiversity, the future of the coast, and our relationship to the places we call home.

It will be a distinctly different presentation from Wade’s evening event, which will range more widely across his extraordinary international experiences, stories and travels.

Wade Davis: North Star
Tuesday, October 13 • 1:00 pm
Denman Hall

NEW SECOND EVENT — TICKETS NOW AVAILABLE

PURCHASE TICKETS

For those already joining us in the evening, the afternoon offers an opportunity to hear another side of Wade Davis: a conversation centred on Canada, British Columbia and the coast we share.

And for those who were unable to get tickets to the evening presentation, this is a new opportunity to see Wade Davis on Denman Island.

We hope you’ll join us.

Denman Island Readers & Writers Festival

09/08/2026

A Special Evening with Wade Davis

https://denmanislandwritersfestival.com/wade-davis/

Tuesday, October 13 • 6:30 pm • Denman Hall

This fall, the Denman Island Readers & Writers Festival is delighted to welcome Wade Davis to Denman Island for a special evening of stories, ideas and conversation.

Anthropologist. Ethnobotanist. Explorer. Photographer. Writer. Storyteller.

For more than four decades, Wade Davis has travelled through some of the world’s most culturally and ecologically extraordinary places... from the Amazon and Andes to Haiti, Borneo, Tibet, the Arctic and the Himalayas... asking what different cultures, landscapes and ways of knowing can teach us about being human.

He is the author of more than twenty books, including The Serpent and the Rainbow, One River, The Wayfinders, Into the Silence, Magdalena and his most recent collection, Beneath the Surface of Things. The Wayfinders grew from his celebrated CBC Massey Lectures, and Into the Silence won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.

What makes Wade such a compelling speaker is the way one story opens naturally into another, from plants and Indigenous knowledge to history, exploration, politics, landscape and the extraordinary diversity of human experience.

At a time when so much of the world can seem divided and diminished, Davis’s work offers a much larger window: onto the many ways human beings have made meaning, built communities, understood the natural world and imagined what a good life might be.

We are especially pleased to bring that conversation to Denman.

Wade Davis

Tuesday, October 13 • 6:30 pm
Denman Hall

Tickets: $25

PURCHASE TICKETS - https://denmanislandwritersfestival.com/wade-davis/

We hope you’ll join us for this rare opportunity to spend an evening with one of Canada’s great storytellers.

Denman Island Readers & Writers Festival

07/13/2026

Festival week is here!

The 2026 Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival takes place this weekend, July 17–19, and we are delighted to welcome writers, readers, visitors, volunteers, and friends back to Denman Island.

As we look forward to this year’s conversations, readings, performances, and gatherings, we invite you to enjoy this short video featuring photographs and memories from Festivals past—a celebration of the writers, audiences, volunteers, and shared experiences that have shaped this special event over the years.

We look forward to making more memories together this weekend.

A Celebration of the intimate Denman Island Readers and Writer's Fe...

06/18/2026

Four Exceptional Workshops. Four Remarkable Writers. Ten Seats Each.

Dear Festival Friends,

Every writer knows the peculiar terror of the blank page: that snowy field where one must either build a world, invent a person, commit to a sentence, or quietly reorganise the spice drawer. This year’s Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival offers a much better alternative: four intimate, three-hour workshops with four extraordinary writers who have spent their careers proving that writing is not magic exactly, but a disciplined form of enchantment.

These workshops are designed for writers at every stage: the beginner with a notebook full of sparks, the veteran with a manuscript in revolt, the poet who has wandered into prose, the novelist who suspects their characters are withholding information, and anyone who wants to spend a few hours in the company of writers who know how stories breathe, misbehave, and finally come alive.

Susan Juby’s Character Building Bootcamp is led by one of Canada’s great comic observers of human oddity. A Leacock Medal winner, beloved novelist, mystery writer, teacher, and champion of “odd ducks,” Juby has an enviable gift for creating characters who are funny because they are true, and true because they are never merely funny. Her fiction moves with wit, generosity, and precision; she knows how to make a character memorable without turning them into a gimmick, and how to let humour open the door to pathos. For writers struggling with flat protagonists, sulking sidekicks, or villains who mostly twirl moustaches, this is bootcamp with a humane drill sergeant.

Maria Reva’s Creating Tension through Character Networks offers a rare chance to learn from a writer whose fiction is as formally inventive as it is emotionally exacting. Reva’s work has been nominated for the Booker Prize and appeared in major literary journals and anthologies. Her fiction moves brilliantly between satire, history, politics, absurdity, and moral seriousness. In Good Citizens Need Not Fear and Endling, she shows how characters press upon one another, conceal and reveal one another, and create the charged atmosphere in which plot becomes inevitable. Writers interested in structure, stakes, ensemble casts, and the beautiful trouble caused by human proximity will find this workshop especially rich.

Loghan Paylor’s Worldbuilding Through the Senses: Writing Fantasy Fiction draws from the richly embodied imagination that gives The Cure for Drowning its power: a world felt through weather, water, memory, longing, fear, and the complicated question of what it means to belong. Paylor’s acclaimed debut, and winner of Canada Reads 2026, is a sweeping, tender, historically grounded novel infused with magic, longing, q***r love, non-binary life, and the search for a truer place to belong. For writers of fantasy, speculative fiction, historical fiction, role-playing narratives, or any story that asks readers to step into another world, this workshop promises practical craft and imaginative expansion.

Wendy Wickwire’s Animating the Creative in Creative Non-Fiction brings participants into the company of a historian and storyteller whose work has reshaped conversations about British Columbia, Indigenous-settler relations, oral history, landscape, memory, and belonging. Her award-winning At the Bridge reflects decades of patient research and narrative care; her long collaboration with Okanagan storyteller Harry Robinson stands as a profound model of listening, responsibility, and literary stewardship. For writers of memoir, biography, history, place-based writing, essays, and documentary prose, Wickwire offers insight into how facts become narrative without losing their ethical weight.
Each workshop is limited to just ten participants. That means these are not distant lectures from a stage, but small-room encounters: close enough for questions, conversation, shared pages, and the kind of practical insight that can alter the course of a draft.

Come with curiosity. Come with a notebook. Come with a problem your writing has been politely refusing to solve. Choose the workshop that calls to you, and give yourself an afternoon in the company of a writer who can help you hear what your own work is trying to become.

Workshop spaces are limited. Please visit the Festival Workshops page and register soon.

Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival

06/05/2026

05/22/2026

The Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival organizers have been made aware that there is a significant lack of available accommodation during the festival writing week (July 12-16, 2026) and the main festival (July 17-19, 2026).

If you are interested in providing accommodation to a festival participant, we would be happy to connect you, leaving you and your potential guest to work out all the details.
Please email [email protected] if you would like to be connected to a festival goer seeking accommodation.

05/11/2026

The Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival is pleased to provide an exceptional workshop opportunity for gamers, writers, worldbuilders, Game Masters, speculative fiction readers, and fans of Loghan Paylor’s work.

Writing for Tabletop Role-playing Games with Loghan Paylor
Denman Island
Thursday July 16, 1:00 to 4:00 pm
Register here: https://denmanislandwritersfestival.com/workshops-2/

Paylor, author of The Cure for Drowning and winner of CBC’s Canada Reads 2026, brings literary imagination, structural craft, and deep narrative curiosity to a workshop designed for anyone interested in the art of interactive storytelling. Whether participants are dreaming of creating their own campaign, developing a one-shot adventure, building a homebrew world, or hoping to write for an established TTRPG publisher.

05/01/2026

Tickets are now available for the 2026 Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival!

Join us July 17–19 for a weekend of books, ideas, conversation, and community, featuring Tomson Highway, Brian Thomas Isaac, Alex Neve, Maria Reva, Susan Juby, Susin Nielsen, Wendy Wickwire, Loghan Paylor, and Zoe Dickinson.

Explore the Festival Schedule, read the Book Reviews, and reserve your Festival Tickets and Meals online. Registration is also open for Workshops and Writing Week for those who want to go deeper into the craft of writing.

Come for the writers, the conversations, the meals, the island welcome, and the pleasure of gathering around stories.

Festival Schedule:
https://denmanislandwritersfestival.com/2026-schedule/

Festival Tickets and Meals:
https://denmanislandwritersfestival.com/festival-2025-registration/

Workshops:
https://denmanislandwritersfestival.com/workshops-2/

Writing Week:
https://denmanislandwritersfestival.com/thewritingweek/

Book Reviews:
https://denmanislandwritersfestival.com/book-reviews/

Book Reviews – 2022 Authors Click on cover to take you to the review or scroll down to see all.