The Sidney and Peninsula Literary Society celebrates the written word. We showcase established and emerging authors and provide regular opportunities for readers and writers to connect. We organize readings throughout the year and sponsor a biennial literary festival. Anyone who enjoys the written word is invited to become a member of the Society.
Saturday November 23rd
2:00 pm PDT
At a Special Venue – The BC Aviation Museum
1910 Norseman Road
Please join us as two authors share their books and Perspectives on Conflict.
“They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old…”
Catherine Lang
Catherine Lang worked as a community newspaper reporter and freelancer at the outset of her writing career in the 1980s and ‘90s. A solo traveller during her 20s in the 1970s, she was passionate about learning and social justice matters, both attributes that led her to study journalism.
Her first book, O-Bon in Chimunesu: A Community Remembered, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 1996. A creative non-fiction work about the former Japanese-Canadian community on Vancouver Island, O-Bon won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, a BC Book Award, in 1997.
She subsequently worked as an editor of provincial legislative debates and in treaty negotiations with Indigenous nations in B.C. When she learned her niece, Michelle Lang, had been killed in Afghanistan, she set her mind to return to the writing life and honour her beloved niece with this memoir, Embedded: The Irreconcilable Nature of War, Loss and Consequence.
An active member of the Victoria chapter of Right to Learn Afghanistan, formerly Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, Catherine has published articles regarding gender apartheid in Afghanistan. The organization is a federally registered nonprofit that delivers virtual education to women and girls in Afghanistan. Catherine is donating ten percent of her royalties to support this work.
Keith C. Ogilvie
Keith C. Ogilvie has enjoyed a varied and highly rewarding background. After working for several years as an aerospace engineer (during which time he also completed a degree in English literature), his career took a new direction, first in technical advisory roles and later in management of international development projects.
It was always his ambition to tell the story of his father’s extraordinary wartime experiences, something he finally achieved in 2016 with publication of The Spitfire Luck of Skeets Ogilvie. This first book, detailing the experiences of a WWII fighter pilot, led to another that recorded the stories of men who had a very different kind of war in the air—Failed to Return: Canada’s Bomber Command Sacrifice in the Second World War. There are many individual stories left to tell, each of them unique and important to record before memories fade altogether.
Tickets available at Tanner’s Books
or online at Eventbrite.ca
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Our festival is supported by granting agencies, local businesses, other arts organizations and individual donors. A special thanks to Tanner’s Books, for their continued support and generous sponsorship. Thanks also to our dedicated team of volunteers without whom we couldn’t hold the festival.
We respectfully acknowledge that the Sidney LitFest and our other events are held on the ancestral, traditional and unceded territories of the SET,TINES – WSÁNEĆ people.