This year Coast Writes features two authors from the qathet region. National Magazine Award-winner andrea bennett (Hearty: On Cooking, Eating, and Growing Food for Pleasure and Subsistence) and Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize-winner Charlotte Gill (Almost Brown: A Mixed-Race Family Memoir) come together with writer and BC Book Prizes Interim Executive Director Megan Cole for a conversation on books and writing.
andrea bennett is a National Magazine Award–winning writer and a senior editor at The Tyee. Their writing has been published by The Walrus, Chatelaine, The Atlantic, the Globe and Mail and many other outlets. Their first book of essays, Like a Boy but Not a Boy, was one of CBC Books’ 2020 picks for the top Canadian nonfiction of the year. Originally from Hamilton, bennett is now back on the west coast in Powell River, BC after a stint in Montreal.
Charlotte Gill was born in London and raised in the United States and Canada. Her latest book, Almost Brown, a mixed-race family memoir, is published by Penguin Random House. She is also the author of Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe, a national bestseller that won the B.C. National Award for Canadian Nonfiction and the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize and the RBC Taylor Prize. Her previous book, Ladykiller, was a Governor General’s Award nominee. Her fiction and narrative nonfiction have appeared in Vogue, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, Lit Hub, The Walrus and many other newspapers and magazines. Gill is a Cohort Director in the Journalism, Writing & Publishing Program at the University of King’s College.
Megan Cole is an artist of many projects. She’s an amateur drummer, dabbler in alternative photography, fibre artist and writer. She believes she has one of the best jobs as the interim Executive Director for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes. Her role includes hosting and producing a weekly podcast, and she’s interviewed authors such as Billy-Ray Belcourt, Michelle Good, Joel Bakan and more. Megan lives in qathet on the territory of the Tla’amin Nation.
