The Sunshine Coast Arts Council, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, will sponsor a Spring Series of author readings in 2018. All events will be held at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre, in Sechelt at the corner of Medusa and Trail, starting at 8 pm. Doors are open at 7:30 pm, and admission is by donation.
Bill Richardson
Saturday, April 7, 8:00 pm
Bill Richardson is, perhaps, best known as a longtime broadcaster with the CBC hosting a variety of programmes: Sounds Like Canada, Canada Reads, and Richardson’s Roundup. A music lover, he also hosted “Saturday Afternoon at the Opera”.
But Bill is also a prolific author of prose and poetry, writing for both adults and children and specialising in a wry, ironic, self-deprecating humour. His book Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast won the Stephen Leacock Humour Medal in 1994. His latest book is The First Little Bastard to Call Me Gramps; Poems of the Late Middle Ages. Canadian author Louise Penny says of it, “These poems are brilliant, hilarious and shockingly human.”
In an interview, Bill said that he is rarely asked to read. Here is an opportunity to hear him and meet him.
Claudia Casper
Saturday, April 28, 8:00 pm
Toronto writer Claudia Casper’s short stories were published in Best Canadian Short Stories in 1996 and in the anthology Dropped Threads, edited by Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson in 2001. Her first novel, The Reconstruction (1996), was described in the Globe and Mail as beautifully written, “with passages of dazzling poetic intensity on almost every page.” Casper is now writing the screenplay for a 3D feature film of the novel to be a France/Canada co-production. Her second novel, The Continuation of Love by Other Means, was short-listed for the Ethel Wilson prize and her third, The Mercy Journals, won the Philip K. Dick Award for the best book of science fiction published in paperback in the US in 2006. Casper has said that her three novels are “a trio about our species: evolution, reproduction and war – light topics, every one.” Casper now lives in Vancouver.
Photos by Paul Clancy
Robert Moor
Saturday, May 19, 8:00 pm
Robert Moor is a dedicated, perhaps fanatical, hiker who, since his thru’hike of the Appalachian Trail, has hiked trails throughout the world, and he has written about his experience in numerous magazines and papers including Harper’s, New Yorker, New York Magazine and Granta. His journalism has won him many awards. He now lives in Halfmoon Bay.
In 2016 Robert published his first book, On Trails: An Exploration, which won The National Outdoor Book Award and The Pacific Northwest Book Award. On Trails is an extensive and wide-ranging meditation on the enormous variety of trails and their significance to the natural and human world. His reflections range from slugs to electronic trails, from first creatures to emerge from the primeval ocean to the modern highway. The Boston Globe wrote: “. . . a deeply thoughtful human meditation on how we walk through life, . . .”, while The Wall Street Journal described Moor as “. . . a philosopher on foot.”
