2026 Kreisel Lecture reflected on “place” with three awe-inspiring speakers

On Friday, February 27, the Centre for Literatures in Canada (CLC) hosted the 2026 Kreisel Lecture. It celebrated the 50th anniversary of the writer-in-residence program at the University of Alberta, which is the first and longest running writer-in-residence program in Canada. 

The lecture was a great success. Despite the snowy drive to the Timms Centre for the Arts, there were smiles on the faces of the entire audience. 

To celebrate this year’s theme, “Writing in Place: Voices From — And In — Canada,” the CLC invited three Canadian authors whose work embodies the meaning of geographical and metaphorical place. 

Senator Paula Simons hosted the event and made the evening electric. She began the night reflecting on warm, personal stories as a student of Henry Kreisel. He is the influential Canadian author who inspired the lecture series. 

Kreisel was a renowned Canadian author and U of A professor. After surviving a Canadian internment camp during the Second World War as an Austrian-born Jew, he studied at the University of Toronto. In 1947, he became a professor at the University of Alberta. He went on to be the Head of the English department, and finally, vice-president at the U of A.

Senator Simons shared how his work has inspired many immigrant Canadians and has had great influence over today’s Canadian literature. 

The Kreisel lecture is an inspiring aspect to his legacy that the CLC has supported annually for many years. In my opinion, the three featured speakers, Richard Van Camp, Shani Mootoo, and Lise Gaboury-Diallo more than lived up to this legacy. 

Van Camp is an award winning Tlicho Dene author from Fort Smith, Northwest Territories. He now lives in Edmonton and has written 30 books. His lecture truly showed how he is a storyteller. 

His funny, witty speech showed his passion for weaving his Indigenous heritage and experiences in Northern Canada in his stories. He spoke not only about his work, but about others too. He mentioned a piece or two that he worked on that shared the importance of honouring the places he came from in his writing. But, the majority of his lecture was listing dozens of Indigenous authors who have made a difference in literature. 

His anecdotes about growing up in Fort Smith and his stories about listening to Elders he drove to bingo showed how much he valued place-based storytelling. 

“Our stories make us stronger,” Van Camp said. His lecture was a great example of how community-focused storytelling truly does make us stronger. 

The second lecturer, Shani Mootoo, further supported this argument by sharing how writing and storytelling protects Canadian literature. Mootoo is an award winning Ireland-born, Trinidad-raised, Canadian author who has engaged in video, visual, and literary art. Many of her novels have characters based in Trinidad, Canada, or both!

Mootoo highlighted the importance of sharing your story for other people to feel seen. She shared how when she was younger, she could not see herself as a writer until she read works by Trinidadian writers. 

Her lecture was both inspiring and down to Earth. It felt like hearing a friend talk about their experience during a writing group.

Mootoo spoke about the importance of being able to see yourself and where you came from in the books you read. She shared about “outsiderness” as a lesbian immigrant from Trinidad, and her journey to accept herself and recognize herself as a “real writer.” It was not until she became a writer-in-residence that she felt like a “real writer.”

I adored her honesty and her intensity as she shared how important it is to support multicultural literature as more than a subgenre. Canada is built around our multicultural identity, and the work we support should reflect that. 

The third speaker, Gaboury-Diallo, brought the featured authors’ three perspectives together. She shared the importance of writers uplifting each other and recognizing their position before writing about a geographical or cultural place. 

Gaboury-Diallo is a Franco-Manitoban poet, and recently retired professor, whose work and collaborations focus on the experiences of language minorities. 

Her talk focused on how “place” is not only a physical space, but also metaphorical. It is the experiences and “layers of otherness” that create our perspectives. 

I appreciated her lecture because it had a scholarly tone. As a retired professor, she spoke as if speaking to a class of students and created an engaging lecture. 

Gaboury-Diallo used the example of her language minority as a Canadian francophone living outside of Quebec to speak about the importance of authenticity in writing, and reading about the perspectives of others. She highlights that it is important to uplift others’ work, and to be careful about appropriating people’s stories. 

In this conversation, Gaboury-Diallo takes great care to share that “we write not for Canada, but in Canada.” I enjoyed her emphasis on writing within a place, and not for a place or group.

After the individual lectures, the three features had a casual conversation with Senator Simons about each other’s themes and how the physical and metaphysical place they write in affects their work. It was a humorous conversation that felt like watching them speak from the comfort of their living room.

The 2026 Kreisel Lecture was a treat to attend. Every speaker brought their own insightful perspective to the conversation. I cannot wait to read the featured speakers‘ books and see what the CLC has to offer for the 2027 Kreisel Lecture.