Saturday Night Festival Gala

Join us at our Saturday Gala for a conversation with Timothy Taylor, award-winning and critically-acclaimed Canadian novelist, journalist and creative writing professor.

We've invited Timothy to take the stage at the new Bowen Theatre for a conversation with one of Bowen's new residents, Tara McGuire, also a published author and journalist. Timothy and Tara will engage in a lively and wide-ranging conversation on the art and craft of writing. Together, they’ll explore process, inspiration, and the many unexpected turns that shape a writer’s life and work. The conversation will be followed by an open audience Q&A, offering a chance to interact directly with both writers. A highlight of the festival, this promises to be a warm, insightful, and memorable evening.

Timothy will be available to sign his books, which can be purchased at the event. His books are also available at Phoenix on Bowen.

About Timothy Taylor

Timothy Taylor is a bestselling and award-winning author of seven book-length works of fiction and nonfiction. He emerged on the writing scene in 2000, when three of his short stories were selected for a single edition of the Journey Prize Anthology. His story Doves of Townsend won the Journey Prize that same year and was included in his collection of short fiction Silent Cruise, which was later named runner-up to the Danuta Gleed Award. Taylor’s first novel, Stanley Park, was released to critical acclaim in 2001 and was nominated for a Giller Prize, a Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and both Vancouver and BC Book Awards. His 2011 novel, The Blue Light Project, was a Canadian bestseller and won the CBC Bookie Prize in fiction. His most recent novel is The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf (2024). This novel returns readers to the world of restaurants and commercial kitchens, exploring the theme of food as a language that we can use to express ourselves on the topic of place, belonging, and the complex inheritance of our own personal histories.

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Taylor has also been a prolific journalist and creative nonfiction writer over the same period. He has published hundreds of feature articles in the past 20 years in such publications as The New York Times, The Walrus, Hakai, EnRoute, 18 Bridges, The Report on Business Magazine, and many others. He has won or been nominated for over two dozen magazine awards, been widely anthologized, and seen his work appear in both the US and France. His nonfiction books Foodville and The Cranky Connoisseur were both food memoirs and meditations on foodie obsessions in Western consumer culture. His most recent nonfiction project is The Hidden Holocaust Papers: Survival, Exile, Return (2025), a six-part documentary podcast based on his Jewish family history, produced in collaboration with the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and Walrus Magazine.

Timothy Taylor’s UBC contact page can be found here.

About Tara McGuire

Tara McGuire is a former broadcaster turned writer. Her book, Holden After and Before - Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose, a hybrid work in memoir and fiction, was shortlisted for the 2023 City of Vancouver Book Award and one of The Walrus’ best books of 2022. Her essays have been published widely in The Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Geist, Room, The ex-Puritain, The Tyee, and CBC Radio, among others. She is a new resident of Bowen Island. 

To learn more about Tara, visit her website by clicking here.