The highlight of the evening will be the 2024 Bookmark Readerity Talk with Fredericton award winning author Lisa Alward in conversation with Deirdre Kessler and John Flood.
Readerity is an exploration of the value of books and reading in the lived-through experience of buying, borrowing, owning, reading, and sharing books through the voices of Maritime authors. It issues from a belief that a bookstore should uphold books and reading as a beneficial leisure activity, advocating for books and reading as a builder of empathy, and a healing salve that can enable us to mend the societal ills that we see in today’s world.
LISA ALWARD’S short fiction has appeared in The Journey Prize and twice in Best Canadian Stories. She has won the Fiddlehead Prize as well as the Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award, has been a finalist for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, an honourable mention in the Peter Hinchcliffe Award, and been featured on numerous other long lists, including for the CBC Story Prize and Prism International’s Jacob Zilber Prize (three times). She was born and grew up in Halifax and completed an English degree at the University of Toronto and an MA at Queen Mary College in London, England. In the eighties and early nineties, she worked in book publishing in Toronto, before moving with her young family to Vancouver and ultimately to Fredericton, New Brunswick, where at fifty she began to write stories. Cocktail (Biblioasis), which received a starred review in Kirkus Reviews, is her debut collection. It is the winner of the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the winner of the New Brunswick 2023 Mrs. Dunster’s Award for Fiction, and was longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.
If you would like to attend, please RSVP to [email protected] so we can prepare accordingly.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Confederation Centre of the Arts, Confederation Centre (South), 120 Grafton St, Charlottetown, PE C1A, Canada,Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island