Author Talks

Friday Author Talk: Brian Brennan

Brian Brennan talks about his life as a writer, how – as an outsider – he went about researching and writing the just published centennial history of the Calgary Public Library, and how he approaches such projects.

Irish-born Brian Brennan is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author in Calgary who has published eight non-fiction books about the colourful characters of Alberta's past. Before completing the centennial history of the Calgary Public Library, he published Leaving Dublin, a book of memoirs about growing up in Ireland and moving to Canada. For more information, check out his website at http://brianbrennan.ca/.

Saturday Author Talk: Marina Endicott

We think of vaudeville as an American artform, a bit sleazy, now dead and gone, and not much missed. While researching another project in the Glenbow archives, Marina Endicott kept running across photographs of Canadian vaudeville performers at the turn of the century. Following the trail of those pretty, unselfconscious girls, she discovered the prairie circuits that wound up and down through Canada and the US: polite vaudeville, which in all its variety, madness, melodrama, hilarity and sorrow, echoes the art of life itself. Endicott will talk about the research process as it pertains to fiction, and give us a guided tour of vaudeville in Alberta and elsewhere.

Marina Endicott was born in Golden, BC, and grew up with three sisters and a brother, mostly in Nova Scotia and Toronto. She worked as an actor and director before going to England, where she began to write fiction. After London she went west to Saskatoon before going farther west to Mayerthorpe, Alberta; she now lives in Edmonton. Her first novel, Open Arms, was short-listed for the Amazon/Books In Canada Award in 2002. Her second, Good to a Fault, was a finalist for the 2008 Giller Prize and won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, Canada/Caribbean. The Little Shadows, her new novel, longlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize, was a finalist for this year’s Governor General’s Award.