For the first time in the event’s history, three speakers will be taking the stage to deliver the Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture, the flagship event hosted annually by the Centre for Literatures in Canada (CLC).
“I think the CLC does something really original on campus,” says Sarah Krotz, current Director of the CLC and Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies. “It’s kind of a bridge builder between the university and wider community, both in Edmonton and far beyond.”
The CLC was launched in 2006, sparked by a generous gift and continued support from Dr. Eric Schloss, and the Kreisel Lecture series started that same year. It now celebrates its 20th anniversary, having built a legacy through hosting prominent Indigenous and Canadian authors such as Eden Robinson, Lynn Coady, Margaret Atwood, Heather O’Neill, Vivek Shraya and Kate Beaton.
“The lecturers have been from all over Canada; they bring diverse perspectives and work in different genres. Every year we hear from a writer who is given the full freedom to create an original talk on something that is interesting and pressing and important to them as a writer,” says Krotz.
“It’s a major event for the Faculty of Arts and the communities that are involved in the CLC, as well as the literary community in Edmonton,” adds Marie Carrière, Vice-Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Arts, Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies and Director of the CLC from 2008 to 2020. “It really brings together different groups and has done that from the beginning, so it’s a special event in that way.”
2026 also marks the 50th anniversary of the Writer-in-Residence Program. To honour both milestones, the CLC sought speakers for the 20th-anniversary lecture who had either been a writer-in-residence at the U of A themselves or participated in CLC programming in some capacity. The selected speakers — Richard Van Camp (writer-in-residence, 2011-12), Shani Mootoo (writer-in-residence, 2001-2) and Lise Gaboury-Diallo (CLC visiting author, 2011) — will bring their voices and viewpoints to this year’s event.
“The lecture offers them a really unique opportunity to speak directly about things that matter to them in a different way than they do otherwise, and to be honest, I don’t know of any kind of regular forum in Canada where that happens,” says Krotz. “It’s something that is different from the art they produce but that gives readers insight into what really animates them, what makes them want to write.”
This year, since three speakers will be sharing the stage, CLC organizers developed a set of shared questions with the authors to use as a jumping-off point.
“The questions are really about that relationship between writing and place,” explains Krotz. “We’re interested in hearing a variety of approaches to these questions as a way of using this 20th anniversary to reflect on what it means to have a Centre for Literatures in Canada.”
“The CLC has a dual mandate of research on the one side, and community engagement on the other,” says Carrière. “It has given people here in Edmonton as well as U of A students and faculty a tremendous opportunity to meet literary talents from across Canada.”
The impact of each lecture extends far beyond the event itself. Every lecture is transformed into a book by the University of Alberta Press for its Kreisel Series, allowing their influence to continue in classrooms and on bookshelves across Canada and beyond. “They’re used in a wide variety of courses, from the high school level into university, because they’re short and that makes them really flexible for instructors,” says Michelle Lobkowicz, Acquisitions Editor at the University of Alberta Press and CLC board member.
Some lectures are relatively easy to adapt into a book, with the U of A Press simply helping the authors to add citations, prepare the text for publication and potentially flow in some extra content that may have been cut from the delivered lecture for timing reasons, explains Lobkowicz. Others can be more of a challenge. For example, Vivek Shraya’s 2021 Kreisel lecture was in the form of a short film, which required some creativity to adapt into a printed format. Ultimately, the spirit of each lecture is captured in the book and made available to audiences who couldn’t attend the live event (or who want to revisit a particularly poignant lecture over and over again).
“If someone collected all 20 volumes, they would see the richness and the variety that we can draw from as Canadian readers here in our own country and hopefully feel some pride in that,” says Lobkowicz.
In the years to come, more authors will join the ranks of Kreisel Lecture speakers, building a literary legacy that will hopefully endure for another two decades and beyond.
“It’s really great to see the CLC celebrating a series that still feels very robust, very relevant, something that people still get excited about,” says Carrière.
“I think that we walk away from these lectures with lots of food for thought — ways of thinking about stories, about poetry, what literature does and why we need it,” adds Krotz.
The 2026 Kreisel Lecture will take place on February 27, 2026, with more information available here.