This year, Author Talks will take place Friday from 7-9 pm. We are proud to present the following authors:

Gail Bowen With her Joanne Kilbourn mystery series, Gail Bowen has become “a name to reckon with in Canadian mystery” (Edmonton Journal). The eight books in the series (Deadly Appearances, 1990; Murder at the Mendel, 1991; The Wandering Soul Murders, 1992; A Colder Kind of Death, 1994; A Killing Spring, 1996; Verdict in Blood, 1998; Burying Ariel, 2000; and most recently Glass Coffin, 2002) offer challenging puzzles and motives with a fair sprinkling of clues. These novels have been so popular that four have been made as made-for-television movies with Wendy Crewson starring as Joanne Kilbourn. Gail Bowen has won such coveted literary awards as the W. H. Smith Books in Canada Award for best first novel and the Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel. As an associate professor and head of the English department at the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, University of Regina, Bowen is able to draw upon a rich background and setting for the creation of her characters and plots. Her heroine, Joanne Kilbourn, has much in common with her creator – both are teachers at Saskatchewan universities, sometime TV panelists, and each has several children and a politically connected husband. But it is the added elements of the books with which her readers empathize: complex family interactions alongside every-day domestic details, prairie urban life and work, the ever-present prairie weather, and the often uneasy presence of the Aboriginal peoples. (photo credit: Don Hall)

Gloria Sawai Gloria Sawai is an Edmonton author, playwright and teacher. Her recent book, A Song for Nettie Johnson, has received five awards, including the 2002 Governor General’s Award for Fiction. An ex-high school English teacher, she has taught creative writing at the Banff School of Fine Arts and Grant MacEwan College and is a past president of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta. She turned to full time writing about five years ago. Although Sawai’s work has been widely published in a variety of publications and anthologies, A Song For Nettie Johnson is her first book-length publication. It spans approximately twenty years of Gloria’s writing career, and features some of her best-known work, as well as newer stories. A collection of nine short stories about love, life and redemption set in a small prairie town, it is published by Coteau Books. Sawai’s writing has been compared with such Canadian literary luminaries as Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence. Her editor says that she reminds him of Alastair McLeod in that “Gloria has made her stories a labour of love and while there’s not a large production, what there is is wonderful.”