Allison the Bookman

10/10/2026

A prolific writer!

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He was taken from his family as a small child. He left school after Grade 9. He slept on the streets and sat in jail cells.

Then he walked into a public library to get warm, and went on to write one of the most important Canadian novels of this century.

This is the story of Richard Wagamese. 🇨🇦

Richard was born on October 14, 1955, near Minaki in northwestern Ontario, a member of the Wabaseemoong Independent Nations. His parents and extended family were survivors of residential schools, and they carried that pain home with them.

As a young boy he was taken into care, part of what is now known as the Sixties Scoop. He grew up in foster homes, where he suffered abuse. At nine he was adopted by a family in St. Catharines, Ontario, who kept him away from his Ojibwe culture and identity. At 16, he left.

The years that followed were hard: homelessness, alcohol, drugs and time in jail. Libraries were his shelter first. Then they became his school. With no formal education past Grade 9, he taught himself to write by reading everything he could.

In 1979 he began working as a journalist at New Breed, an Indigenous publication in Saskatchewan. He later became a columnist at the Calgary Herald, and in 1991 he became the first Indigenous writer to win a National Newspaper Award for column writing. He also wrote for the TV series North of 60.

In his twenties he reunited with his birth family. An elder gave him the name Mushkotay Beezheekee Anakwat, Buffalo Cloud, and told him his role in life was to tell stories.

He did exactly that. His first novel, Keeper'n Me, came out in 1994. More than a dozen books followed: novels, memoirs, poetry and reflections.

In 2012 he published Indian Horse, the story of Saul Indian Horse, an Ojibwe boy who survives residential school and finds freedom on the ice playing hockey. It was a Canada Reads finalist, won the Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature, and is now taught in classrooms across the country. In 2017 it became a film directed by Stephen Campanelli, with Clint Eastwood as executive producer.

His 2014 novel Medicine Walk, about a teenager taking his dying father on a final journey into the backcountry, is considered by many to be his finest work.

Richard Wagamese died on March 10, 2017, in Kamloops, British Columbia. He was 61. His final novel, Starlight, was published unfinished in 2018.

He never attended a residential school himself. But through his own life and his books, he showed Canadians how that harm travelled from one generation to the next, and how story, land and forgiveness can help a person find the way home.

Have you read Indian Horse or another of his books? 🍁

10/08/2026

10/08/2026

Congrats to Anne Carson!!🍁🇨🇦

BREAKING NEWS
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the Canadian author Anne Carson, “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”

Anne Carson was born in 1950 in Toronto, Canada. In 1981, she published her doctoral thesis in Classics entitled ‘Odi et Amo Ergo Sum’, and has, throughout her entire career, combined poetry writing with translation work and teaching at various universities. Almost all her literary production has centred upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning. She has herself identified the etymology of words as the starting point for all her work. Her translations from Classical Greek may be regarded as independent works in their own right. Among these is her interpretation of Sappho’s poem fragments, ‘If Not, Winter’ (2002), along with tragedies such as Sophocles’s ‘Electra’ (2001) and ‘Antigone’ (2015) and Euripides’s ‘Bakkhai’ (2015).

In the 1990s, Carson published a series of notable works. Among these is ‘The Glass Essay’ in ‘Glass, Irony, and God’ (1995), which demonstrates the potential of the long poem where genre boundaries are seen to blur.

The same decade saw the publication of another work, often heralded as Carson’s greatest, entitled ‘Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse’ (1998). This demonstrates her eminent ability to actualise the classical literary tradition. With a precise feel for contemporary idioms and experiences, she takes as her starting point poem fragments by the sixth century BC Greek poet Stesichoros concerning the winged red monster Geryon.

Throughout her entire authorship, Carson with a light touch explores the possibilities of writing, a process by which the literary sketch has become of particular value to her. Bearing witness to this is ‘Float’ (2016), a work consisting of twenty-two chapbooks on different subjects, capable of being read in any order. Another is ‘Wrong Norma’ from 2024, a diverse combination of texts with a strongly performative aspect in which Carson crosses over into various artistic and academic fields. Her collaborations with visual artists and choreographers and with opera and theatre directors demonstrate the freedom with which she relates to literary expectations and rule systems. It is this that lies behind the outstanding importance her work since the 1990s has had for the international art and literature scene.

Anders Olsson
Chair of the Nobel Committee

Learn more about the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature: https://bit.ly/4hnkhNO

10/07/2026

New stock that hit the shel ves!

10/06/2026

A great bucket list for reading an array of incredible stories! How many have you read from The list? 📚

10/02/2026

Teachers of Grade 3 classes - did you know?! 🍁✍🏼📝

09/29/2026

Reminder we are opening late tomorrow. 12pm.