British Columbia

British Columbia authors write from a province that is as much a set of arguments as a place: resource towns, coastal cities, islands, and the people who arrived or were pushed to the margins. The writers here include Douglas Coupland, Michael Christie, Chelene Knight and Harrison Mooney, alongside poets, memoirists and novelists such as Angélique Lalonde, Eddy Boudel Tan and Michael V. Smith.

What separates the writers of British Columbia from those grouped under Ontario is not a subject but a stance. Douglas Coupland has spent a career treating the province's sprawl and tech money as material, while Michael Christie builds novels out of the coastal forest economy and the families it makes and breaks. Several of these authors work from the edge of the map: Chelene Knight writes Vancouver's Hogan's Alley and the Black history that survived its erasure, and Harrison Mooney writes about being a Black child adopted into a white evangelical family in the Fraser Valley. Others take the water as a starting point. Kate Harris crosses mountain and river routes in her travel writing, Mark Leiren-Young writes about the southern resident orcas, and Kara Stanley writes about a life reshaped by spinal cord injury. The result is a list that keeps returning to landscape, labour and who gets to belong.