Don Gillmor: Heliconian Club Literary Lecture Series
2026-09-08 19:30 - 21:00 (America/Toronto) | Heliconian Club, 35 Hazelton Ave, Toronto, ON, M5R 2E3, Canada
Don Gillmor will be a featured author at the Heliconian Club’s Literary Lecture Series! The event will take place on Tuesday, September 8 at 7:30PM. Books will be available for sale and signing by Ben McNally.
More details TK.
Grab Cherry Beach here!
Check out Don Gillmor’s previous books here.
ABOUT CHERRY BEACH
“This is one of the best Canadian crime novels of this or any year . . . Toronto now takes its place with Los Angeles, New York, and Boston as a character in the action and it’s great.”—Margaret Cannon, Globe and Mail
A brutal murder exposes secret real estate deals, a corrupt police force, and the dark heart of a city simmering with unrest.
When two girls are found murdered in a rundown Toronto high-rise, Jamieson Abel and his partner are first on the scene. Abel is a law school dropout turned police detective chronically at odds with his colleagues and perpetually on the brink of being terminated, and Davis is the department’s only female officer of colour. Both understand their being partnered as a form of banishment, but when the details of the murder go public at the start of an excruciatingly hot summer, they find themselves thrust into the centre of a front page investigation that will bring to a head the city’s long history of shady real estate deals and racist disenfranchisement.
Intricately plotted and brilliantly layered, Cherry Beach is a gripping literary crime novel that examines class, race, and corruption in the most multicultural city in the world.
ABOUT DON GILLMOR
Don Gillmor is the author of To the River, which won the Governor General’s Award for nonfiction. He is the author of five novels, Cherry Beach, Breaking and Entering, Long Change, Mount Pleasant, and Kanata; a two-volume history of Canada, Canada: A People’s History; and nine books for children, two of which were nominated for the Governor General’s Award. He was a senior editor at The Walrus, and his journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, GQ, Saturday Night, Toronto Life, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. He has won twelve National Magazine Awards and numerous other honours. He lives in Toronto.

Garth Martens at WORD Vancouver
2026-09-19 11:00 - 12:00 (America/Vancouver) | UBC Robson Square, 800 Robson Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 3B7, Canada
Poet Garth Martens (Who Else in the Dark Headed There) will be at WORD Vancouver festival for the panel “The Art of Transformation.” Garth will be joined in conversation by Eve Joseph and Billeh Nickerson, moderated by Renée Sarojini Saklikar, as they each travel through very different landscapes: a mother’s disappearance, the haunted rooms of childhood, and a hospital stay that prompts reflections on mortality, luck, and survival. Through inventive and deeply attentive uses of language, each writer transforms lived experience into something unexpected, illuminating how memory reshapes the past, how imagination unsettles the ordinary, and how poetry can help us navigate uncertainty and change. Through loss, humour, wonder, and resilience, these poets reveal what endures and what becomes possible in the aftermath of transformation.
The event will take place on Saturday, September 19 at 11AM, at the Poetry Tent in UBC Robson Square.
More details here.
Get Who Else in the Dark Headed There here!
ABOUT WHO ELSE IN THE DARK HEADED THERE
In his first collection since the Governor General’s–nominated Prologue for the Age of Consequence, Martens adds an autobiographical lens to his concerns about class and labour.
A mother disappears. A son struggles to make sense of the life she left behind. Set against the stark northern Alberta of the 1980s and 90s, Who Else in the Dark Headed There follows a man reaching through time to find the child he was and the father he is becoming.
Beneath this waking world is another world, of the overheard, of the unsaid. To enter is to find a lyricism finely wrought and hallucinatory, a depth of feeling and fidelity to metaphor in all its guises—but most of all an urgent relationship with language. Here, in a reconstruction of childhood’s rooms, Garth Martens approaches the past not as a record but as a pressure, a “muscled concentration” that reorders, resuscitates, and redoubts.
ABOUT GARTH MARTENS
Garth Martens is the author of Prologue for the Age of Consequence and Who Else in the Dark Headed There. For his first book, he was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is also a past winner of the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. His poetry appears in Dark Mountain Project, Poetry Ireland, Hazlitt, This Magazine, Vallum, Fiddlehead, and Best Canadian Poetry. He is also a member of Palabra Flamenco, a literary flamenco ensemble that joins traditional flamenco dance and music with poetry and oral storytelling. He lives in Victoria, BC.
