LitFest Short History 

LitFest is Canada’s only Creative Non-fiction Festival. It brings together some of the world’s best selling, award winning and emerging authors, writers, filmmakers and artists with audiences at readings, panel discussions and presentations.  

Edmonton is a creative incubator for award winning, best selling and emerging authors and writers. LitFest promotes and celebrates this local talent through a variety of panels and discussions.

Creative non-fiction allows a writer to employ the diligence of a reporter, the shifting voices and viewpoints of a novelist, the refined work play of a poet and the analytical modes of the essayist and a journalist.

LitFest showcases the ability of this genre to inspire and provoke debates on the themes that define our present and may shape our future.

LitFest: Edmonton International Literary Festival was created in 2002 as the successor of the Alberta Book Fair, an annual trade fair for almost 20 years.

LitFest 2008 Board

LitFest board members are committed to promoting local emerging authors and to bringing established and new writers from Canada and around the world to Edmonton. They are active in the literary community and work enthusiastically to bring the best creative non-fiction writers to Edmonton.

President
Curtis Gillespie

Gillespie is an award winning author and former Writer-in-residence at Grant MacEwan College and the University of Alberta. In addition to three published books, Gillespie’s work has appeared in Saturday Night Magazine, New York Times, Globe and Mail and Toro.

Treasurer
Todd Anderson
University of Alberta Bookstore

Secretary
Liz Grieve

Directors at Large
Linda Cook
Alice Major
Donna Fong
Ruth Anderson Donavon

Past President
Miki Andrejevic

Producer/Artistic Director
David Cheoros