The Fat Oyster Reading Series returns to the Fanny Bay Hall on Thursday, Feb. 22, at 7 p.m., with three guests, including Governor General Award-winning author Joan Thomas.
The Winnipeg-based novelist will be reading from her fifth book, Wild Hope, a contemporary story about love, food, art, and ambition in a swiftly changing world.
Her previous novel, Five Wives, based on an ill-fated missionary endeavour in Ecuador in 1956, won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 2019. Thomas’s earlier work was nominated for the Giller Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Margaret Laurence Award, and won a Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book, to name a few.
Montreal author Anita Anand will be reading from her IPPY Gold Medal-winning book, Convergence of Solitudes, a story of identity, connection and forgiveness that shares the lives of two families across Partition of India, Operation Babylift in Vietnam, and two referendums in Quebec. The recipient of numerous awards, Anand writes original work and translates books into English.
Leading off the evening and just in time for herring season, local writer Dave Flawse will be sharing, 1979, a true story about the year gold swam in B.C. waters—when herring gillnetters walked down local docks with $100,000 in plastic bags, and how it all came crashing down.
Flawse writes at the intersection of history, science, and local interest for a selection of BC magazines. He’s regularly published in the BC Review for analysis of Canadian literature and is the publisher of VancouverIslandHistory.com.
The Fanny Bay Hall, 7793 Island Hwy S. Admission to the Fat Oyster Reading Series is by donation.
Other engagements
Friday, Feb. 23, Thomas and Anand will be reading again at New Horizons, 1765 Sollans Road, Hornby Island. Begins at 5 p.m.
Saturday, Feb. 24, Joan Thomas hosts a workshop surrounding digging for the story, where participants investigate how imagination and memory feed into the stories they write. Same location. 11:15 a.m.-3 pm. Cost $50. Space limited.