Elephant Mountain Literary Festival offering West Kootenay book club members chance to meet authors
By Contributor
Nelson, B.C.’s Elephant Mountain Literary Festival is offering West Kootenay book club members discounted tickets to the 2018 event and a chance for their club to meet with one of the festival’s invited authors.
“If your book club is registered with us,” said EMLF executive director Natasha Smith, “your members receive a 10 per cent discount on the 2018 Festival Gold Pass which admits the holder to all festival events.” The 2018 festival will run from July 11 to 15, with a regular Gold Pass priced at $70.
Book clubs can register by contacting Smith at emlf@emlfestival.com Club members who are interested in receiving occasional updates about visiting writers, events, and festival programming are also welcome to contact Smith. “We are interested in input from book clubs about the festival, as well,” Smith said. “Feedback is an invaluable help as we put our program together.”
Some clubs, Smith said, have requested that the festival post a list of books by forthcoming festival presenters. Books by confirmed 2018 EMLF presenters are now listed on the EMLF website under the Read On tab: www.emlfestival.com/read-on/
EMLF showcases writers and other literary professionals from the West Kootenay as well as from the larger national community. Confirmed presenters this year include current Jamaica poet laureate Lorna Goodison. Her prose memoir Harvey River: A Memory of My Mother and Her People won the 2008 $40,000 B.C. Award for Canadian Nonfiction. Appearing with her will be her husband J. Edward Chamberlin, an expert on narrative and an aboriginal land claims activist on several continents. His 2003 book If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? was shortlisted for both the Charles Taylor Prize and the Pearson Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize. The couple live on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast.
This year Elephant Mountain Literary Festival is also offering two prizes for book clubs, Smith said. The first is an opportunity for a book club to meet personally with their chosen festival presenter. To compete for this special session with an author, a club submits a 500-word maximum anecdote involving their club. The winning club then picks which presenting author they would like to meet with during the author’s time in Nelson.
The second prize offered, Smith said, is one free Gold Pass issued to the club with the most original or creative name.
Deadline for submissions is March 1, 2018, with submissions sent to emlf@emlfestival.com
