KWF2025 Virtual Showcase

Kingston WritersFest 2025 featured celebrated authors from across Canada, in provocative, inspiring conversations that brought audiences to their feet. Now, experience it again—or for the very first time—with the KWF2025 Virtual Showcase: a curated selection of 5 full-length events, each professionally recorded.

Other festivals charge admission for their digital festivals, with only limited access. As a gesture of thanks to our supporters, we present the KWF2025 Digital Showcase as a free series guaranteed to intrigue, delight, and transform the way you see the world.

Festival Kick-off

Recorded August 24, 2025 | Margaret Atwood with Ian Williams

Margaret Atwood, who gave us the theme of KWF2025, takes the stage for a profound, witty, and far-seeking conversation with award-winning novelist and poet Ian Williams, author of the 2024 Massey Lectures, What I Mean to Say: Remaking Conversation in Our Time.

Through more than fifty books, Atwood has proved the power of words to spark global conversations about dystopian futures, women’s rights, environments at risk. She claims she isn’t a seer, yet her books are eerily prescient: what lies ahead for her and for us?

#1 Resistance and Refuge

Recorded September 18, 2025 | Madeleine Thien & Canisia Lubrin with Eric Friesen

Madeleine Thien’s Book of Records casts a curious girl and her secretive father in a speculative fable of migration. Uncertain of any future, the child is rescued by books, migrants’ tales, and fragments of famous past lives. Canisia Lubrin’s debut novel, which won the 2025 Carol Shields Prize, is rooted in the Code Noir of 1685 that governed slavery and shaped the modern world. Her diverse characters from the past, present and future, struggle to live free of history.

#13 Walking With Beth

Recorded September 21, 2025 | Merilyn Simonds

In the spring of 2021, Merilyn Simonds asked her friend Beth Robinson if she’d like to go for a walk. Simonds had just turned 70, entering what struck her as a mysterious, even frightening stage of life. Beth, a vibrant centenarian, was as awake to the world as a person half her age. Who better to ask what might come next? Walking with Beth is a unique take on longevity and friendship, full of wisdom, tenderness, joy, and the passions that sustain a long life.

#16 Developing a Reader’s Eye

Recorded September 21, 2025 | Sadiqa de Meijer

Reading, like other encounters with art, deepens our experience of life itself. We can feel ourselves changed by a painting or a sculpture or a book. Drawing on her new collection of essays, In the Field, Kingston Poet Laureate and Governor General’s Award winner Sadiqa de Meijer explores the ways in which reading becomes transformative. What happens in our imaginations when we engage in the collaborative solitude of reading a book? And what are the implications of that alchemy for our culture and ourselves?