The Victoria Festival of Authors is Vancouver Island’s largest celebration of books and book lovers. This year, it’s celebrating its fifth anniversary, it’s all online, and it’s all free.
“It was really important to us that it was free,” says festival producer Laura Trunkey. “We just want to reach as many people as we can, and make sure there’s no barrier to accessing the program.”
Starting on Wednesday, September 30, podcasts and Zoom meetings will be available on the festival’s website. The event includes panels led by published authors from across Canada, poetry readings, and writing workshops. All works featured in the festival have been released in the past year, with the predominant focus being on the local writers.
“We always want to have some local authors, so about a third of our authors are local, and the rest are from across Canada,” says Trunkey. “We even have a couple streaming from the United States that are Canadian.”
Diversity of program panels and writing style is also of huge importance for the Festival of Authors. Trunkey emphasizes that these differences are essential to the festival’s mission.
“It’s really important to us that we have a diversity of voices in the festival, so we have all genres of writing,” she says. “We have emerging authors as well as established authors. We like to pair those together because if someone goes to an event because of a particular author they know about or have read before, they’ll also be introduced to newer authors or authors they haven’t read before.”
Trunkey says that while most of the authors had been invited before the festival transitioned online, she still had a vision for what the festival would look like.
“We figured for our discussions Zoom was a good transition, but we always have a night of poetry reading and a night of prose reading, and those readings translate really well to a podcast,” she says. “We didn’t have to turn any [authors] away. Their programming was different than when we first invited them, but they were still able to participate in the festival.”
Although the format of the festival might be different from previous years, the organizers are hoping that attendees are still able to enjoy the events.
“I think we have a city that really cares deeply about reading and writing,” says Trunkey. “I think that being able to maintain that community, although in a different form, has been something that a lot of people have really appreciated and are excited about.”
Victoria Festival of Authors
Free, until Sunday, October 4
victoriafestivalofauthors.ca