Use the Search Button (top right) to look up a book title, an author, location (e.g., Vancouver), or key words (e.g., thriller) or visit our Invite An Author page.
Visit our Invite An Author page to learn more about our amazing authors!
When our website launched on January 1, 2020, we set 15 authors as a goal (including the two of us!) for the month. We ended with 40! Forty amazing authors from across Canada.
As Canadian authors and readers ourselves, we wanted to support Canadian book publishers and authors who worked and lived in Canada. We wanted to create a community that was welcoming and inclusive with authors from big and small publishing houses, and authors at different stages of their professional writing careers.
We thank all the authors who have joined The Authors’ Book Club. We could not have done this without you! A special thanks to Uzma Jalauddin, Laurie Petrou, Marissa Stapley, Blair Hurley, and Farzana Doctor who were among the first authors to support this initiative. Thank you for leading the way! We also want to thank Deborah Dundas from the Toronto Star and Sue Carter from Quill & Quire for helping to generate awareness of what we are doing.
As we continue to welcome authors, we will now focus on increasing our visibility amongst private book clubs. We remain committed to creating a vibrant online community for author and reader engagement.
As two authors working to bring readers and authors together, we felt it was vital that we have someone representing the reader and book club as part of our team. To that end, we welcome Fiona Ross to The Authors’ Book Club.
Fiona is an avid reader, a teacher librarian, and a current member of two book clubs. She is also the past chair of the Secondary Fiction Review Committee at the Peel District School Board and currently serves on the planning committee at the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD).
We look forward to Fiona’s input and her unique perspective as a reader and book club member. We are confident that her contributions will further support our efforts to connect readers with authors across Canada.
Read Fiona’s post about being a book club addict! Follow her on Twitter.
Our website is 11 days old. We are grateful to the authors who have joined our initiative to connect readers with authors working and living across Canada.
Readers, can you name our amazing authors?
Answers:
Click on their names to learn more about them & how you can invite an author to your next book club meeting.
11 Blair Hurley
It was the day before Christmas of 2019, and Ann Y.K. Choi and I were having lunch, reminiscing on an eventful year for each of us. Ann had worked hard on her new novel, and was still in the midst of relentless edits; she had completed a children’s book, to be released the following year; and there was all her other regular work: mentoring young writers, working full-time as a teacher, and speaking about her first novel, Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety. I had released my first novel, Undercard, that February, and had spent the year adapting to being a published author, a thrilling, rewarding, and often overwhelming experience.
Ann is the first person I met at my first literary event as a published author. It was at the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) 2018, just a few months before my book would be released, and entering the building my publicist bumped into Ann, whom she had worked with previously. Ann was immediately personable, encouraging, and friendly, and I thought, wow, people in the literary community really are nice (they are, although Ann is at another level). Since then Ann has been a supportive friend, and a wise counsel for a new author.
During lunch she asked me if I was speaking at many book clubs. While I have spoken at some, I found it difficult to connect with them. I would gladly speak to many more, but there’s no repository I know of where book clubs are listed, or where I can list my name as available to book clubs. Ann said, someone should do that. And it was only moments later that we both agreed we should do that. And so began the concept of The Authors’ Book Club.
Welcome to our online community!