Monday, November 20th 2017 | 5:30—10:00 pm
WURST Beer Hall & Restaurant at 2437 4th St SW, Calgary | Private Room Downstairs
$15 until October 2 | $20 after October 2 | $25 at the door
WGA Perk: First 20 WGA members to register will be reimbursed for their tickets
ALL proceeds go toward literacy programs in Southern Alberta
With the support of Shelf Life Books and Freehand Books, the Writers’ Guild of Alberta will host Calgary’s 8th annual celebration of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, our largest-scale monthly event that brings readers, writers and supporters of the arts together in a vibrant and entertaining atmosphere to celebrate books, reading—and to raise money for literacy. Book championing! Door prizes! Guess the Giller contests! Live broadcast on big screens! Generous raffle prize donations; local book blogger and Past President of the WGA Anne Logan will host the evening and 2017 book defenders include Cheryl Foggo, Kris Demeanor, Clem Martini, Chris Turner, and Aritha van Herk.
ANNE LOGAN worked in the Canadian publishing industry for 7 years and loved every minute of it. She now writes reviews for various publications and is the books columnist for CBC Calgary’s Homestretch. She is the Past President of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Board of Directors and hosts literary events around the city, including a monthly community book club discussion at the Wordfest Lab. The majority of the books she reviews on her blog have been sent to her from the publisher in exchange for an honest review, and all opinions are her own. Find her at www.ivereadthis.com.
CHERYL FOGGO is an accomplished and award-winning playwright, screenwriter, young adult novelist, and fiction and non-fiction author. She has been widely published as a journalist in various publications including Canadian Magazine, Avenue, AlbertaViews, Western Living, Arts Bridge, Muse, the Calgary Herald, The Globe and Mail and Legacy. Her play John Ware Reimagined had its successful world premiere production by Ellipsis Tree Collective Theatre Company in Calgary in August 2014; the script went on to win the Writers’ Guild of Alberta 2015 Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama. Well known for her work uncovering the stories of Alberta’s early Black pioneers, her multi-media presentations Ranchers, Rebels and Righteous, Creole, Travelling On, Five Voices and Unlocking Sacred Codes have received multiple presentations across Alberta.
KRIS DEMEANOR is a songwriter, poet, theatre and film artist. He’s released seven recordings of original songs, most recently ‘Entirely New Beasts’ in spring 2016, featuring co-writes and beats programming by Rae Spoon. Kris was the inaugural Poet Laureate of Calgary (2012-14) and co-edited The Calgary Project, a compilation of poetry by Calgary writers. In 2015 he was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award as best supporting actor for his role in the film The Valley Below. Recent work includes Making Treaty 7, a multi-disciplinary show featuring First Nations and non-aboriginal artists illuminating Alberta’s history; writing songs for CBC’s The Irrelevant Show; collaborating with Ian Tyson on two songs for his latest record; and Shelter From the Storm—a song writing project with clients of Calgary’s Drop in Centre. Kris was awarded the Lieutenant Governor General’s Established Artist Award at the Mayor’s Lunch in 2017, and had released his first print publication, the instructional booklet ‘How to be an Asshole of Calgary’.
Professor CLEM MARTINI is an award winning playwright, novelist, and screenwriter with over thirty plays, and ten books of fiction and nonfiction to his credit, including the Calgary Book Award-winning Bitter Medicine: A Graphic Memoir of Mental Illness and the recently launched The Unravelling. His texts on playwriting, The Blunt Playwright, The Greek Playwright, and The Ancient Comedians are employed widely at universities and colleges across the continent. He currently teaches in the School of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Calgary.
CHRIS TURNER is the award-winning author of six books and one of Canada’s leading writers and speakers on climate change solutions and the global energy transition. His most recent book The Patch, the story of Alberta’s oil sands, was published in Canada and internationally by Simon & Schuster in September. Turner’s bestsellers The Leap and The Geography of Hope were both National Business Book Award finalists, and How to Breathe Underwater, a collection of his award-winning essays and feature writing, won the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize. He was a 2013 Berton House writer-in-residence in Dawson City, Yukon, and a 2010 Paul D. Fleck Fellow at the Banff Centre. He lives in Calgary with his wife and two children.
ARITHA VAN HERK is a cultural commentator and award-winning Canadian novelist whose work has been acclaimed throughout North America and Europe. She has given readings, lectures, and workshops on culture and community, literature and life, in the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore, Australia, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Austria, the Baltics, and Scandinavia. AvH first rose to international literary prominence with the publication of Judith, which received the Seal First Novel Award and which was published in North America, the United Kingdom and Europe. Her other novels include The Tent Peg; No Fixed Address; Places Far From Ellesmere; Restlessness; In Visible Ink. Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta offers an unorthodox narrative of the province’s past. AvH returned to her Alberta stories to create Audacious and Adamant, the companion book to the exhibition. AvH is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and a Professor who teaches Canadian Literature and Creative Writing in the Department if English at the University of Calgary—but first of all, she is a writer who loves stories.