29th Annual

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August 4–7, 2011
Sechelt, BC, Canada

Meet the Writers: New Voices

Sunday August 7 2:30 pm

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Sponsored by: Coast Reporter

19 New Voices

with host Sheryl MacKay

Jane Romain

Janet Romain

Janet Romain is a Vancouver-born Métis Canadian. She has lived most of her life in Northern BC where she has worked at everything from short order cooking and lumber grading to cattle ranching, which she currently does with her husband near Fort Fraser, BC. She can now add “published novelist” to her lengthy resumé.

Her first novel, praised by Richard Van Camp as “a marvel to read and an instant classic,” is Grandpère. It is the story of a 98-year-old elder of the Carrier Nation, his widowed granddaughter who looks after him and is documenting his stories, and her 13-year-old granddaughter who turns up on their doorstep seeking refuge from a life of neglect and abuse in the big city. It is a gentle story in which tragedy and loss are ultimately resolved in hope.

Gurjinder Basran

Gurjinder Basran

Gurjinder Basran has told a mother/daughter story. Hers is a work of fiction in the form of an exceptional first novel. Everything Was Good-Bye is a classic story of the cultural tug-of-war between first generation immigrants to Canada and their second-generation offspring. The children often live in a cultural hinterland, not quite comfortable in either of their two worlds. In this instance a young Indo-Canadian woman being raised by her widowed mother struggles to break free from the constraints and behavioural expectations of her traditional Punjabi community. Basran’s straightforward writing evokes a strong sense of that cultural claustrophobia. Everything Was Good-Bye was the winner of last year’s “Search for the Great BC Novel.”

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