The Grand Finale!
Main Stage closes out the 2023 Read by the Sea literary festival on Saturday, July 8 with four of Canada’s literary greats.
Featured authors for 2023 are Nova Scotian novelist, Bruce Bishop; African Nova Scotian poet, author, Tedx speaker, writer, activist and community volunteer, Angela Bowden; Canadian Arctic author, storyteller and former broadcaster, currently living in Ottawa, Whit Fraser; and TV host / interviewer, author, professional speaker and actor, Nancy Regan. Watch this page for more information about this stellar line-up.
Have you read works by any of our featured authors? Recommend their poetry, prose, and creative non-fiction to other Read by the Sea enthusiasts by sending us your reader reviews. We’ll share them here as part of this year’s festival (using only your first name and your province/territory or country of residence). Submit your reviews (250-word maximum) using the Contact Us form.
Bruce Bishop
Bruce W. Bishop was born and raised in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, which is the predominant setting for his novels Unconventional Daughters and Undeniable Relations. He received his post-secondary degrees from Saint Mary’s University (Halifax) and the Ontario College of Art & Design University (Toronto) and began a freelance writing career in 1997. He lived in Toronto for a total of twenty-five years.
He was elected for two one-year terms as president of the Travel Media Association of Canada in 2000. He was later hired as Director of Public Relations at the InterContinental Toronto Centre while he continued his freelance writing.
His articles and photos have appeared in over 100 print and online publications in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and Brazil. His contributions to several guidebook publishers include Fodor’s and DK Eyewitness guides, and he was principal writer for the Michelin Green Guide to Atlantic Canada (2008). He also authored the Marco Polo Guide to Muskoka and won the inaugural Cayman Islands Award in Caribbean Travel Writing.
Bishop’s favourite quote is “We always may be what we might have been” from a poem by Adelaide Anne Procter (1825-1864). After writing non-fiction for many years, he didn’t plan to author a novel, but started to write Unconventional Daughters during the COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020.
After an investigation with literary agencies about the length of time it could take to see his debut novel on bookshelves, he made the decision to teach himself how to self-publish.
“The ‘indie’ journey has been all-consuming over the past three years, but is most definitely worthwhile,” Bishop says.
He followed up his debut novel by writing Uncommon Sons which featured a secondary character from ‘Daughters’ as the protagonist. Due to the success of ‘Sons’, he wrote Undeniable Relations, set in the mid-1950s, again using the setting of Yarmouth, N.S. This third novel in the Families’ Storytelling trilogy was released in December 2022.
He is currently in development with a Canadian TV production company to adapt Unconventional Daughters for television.
Angela Bowden
Angela Bowden is an African Nova Scotian woman, mother, Tedx speaker, poet, author, writer, activist, community volunteer and a current graduate student at Saint Mary's University in the joint women and gendered studies program with Mount Saint Vincent University. Her work is informed by her lived experiences as a Black woman and the unspoken stories of Black joy and struggle that she has heard around kitchen tables and her community, for decades. Angela is a story keeper and teller: gathering and documenting family and community stories, preserving their legacies and celebrating the healing that comes from bearing witness.
A descendent of the stolen Africans sold through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, her roots were preserved through the Black Loyalist‘s arrival in Birchtown in 1783 and subsequent migrations to Guysborough County and then New Glasgow where she was born and raised. Angela’s ongoing work and published book of poetry, UnSpoken Truth: unmuted and unfiltered: highlights, documents and challenges systemic and overt racism entrenched in Nova Scotia reclaiming the legacy of love and resilience preserved and embedded in the joy and survival of African culture throughout the diaspora. A strong advocate of self care, she encourages self love, reflection, empowerment, deep healing and change. Angela writes in many genres; Black Girl Black Girl, to be released June 6, 2023, is her first children's story and carries a powerful message of self-love and empowerment for melanated girls.
Angela's unique voice and profound writing offers critical perspectives and solutions to social problems that are vital in these times; seeking to spark what she refers to as “innerstanding” to all she encounters.
Whit Fraser
Whit Fraser who’s first broadcasting job was at CKEC in New Glasgow, left the RCAF in 1967 for a job with CBC in Frobisher Bay, now Iqaluit. For the next fifty plus years, whether living north or south and including, years in Ottawa, Whit Fraser traveled to every corner of the north, from Labrador to Alaska, and throughout the circumpolar world, including the North Pole itself
He is the spouse of Mary May Simon, Canada’s first Indigenous governor general and the 30th governor general since Confederation.
Mr. Fraser is an author and a storyteller who has had a front row seat to many of the historic events in the last half century in the Canadian Arctic.
His passion for the Arctic and its peoples began more than five decades ago when he began sharing important stories for Indigenous peoples and other northerners on TV and radio. His coverage included the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, the negotiations leading to the signing of comprehensive Inuit land claims agreements, and the historic First Ministers' meetings in the 1980s where Indigenous rights were affirmed in Canada’s constitution. In all, Mr. Fraser spent 25 years with the CBC, including 8 years as a national Parliamentary reporter in Ottawa.
In the years following his extensive journalistic career, Mr. Fraser remained closely connected to the North. He was the founding chair of the Canadian Polar Commission from 1991 to 1997, working with the board of directors on a series of recommendations and measures aimed at enhancing science policy in the Polar Regions and improving human health and social issues in the North.
As the executive director of the national Inuit organization, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, from 2001 to 2006, he coordinated the Inuit-specific agenda presented to the Kelowna First Ministers’ meeting on Aboriginal issues in 2005.
1n 2019, Whit Fraser became an author, with the award winning national best seller True North Rising that documented his eye witness perspective to events and people who confronted and challenged colonialism and changed both the North and Canada. Many who have read and reviewed his memoir say that True North Rising is a must read for anyone with an interest in Canada arctic and its people.
In 2021, Whit Fraser turned his hand to historical fiction, writing the unique and compelling Cold Edge of Heaven. A story set in the Canadian Arctic in the 1920’s at a desolate police outpost on Devon Island in Canada’s far north. This is a story of murder, mystery, and love—intensified by a clash of cultures between Inuit guides and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers who live and work alongside them.
In both books and public appearances, he brings a first-hand, on-the-ground perspective to events that confronted and challenged colonialism and brought about a far greater measure of equality and reconciliation across Northern Canada in a way that no one else can.
Nancy Regan
Nancy Regan is thrilled to be a part of this year’s Read by the Sea festival. From Showing Off to Showing UP is her first book, and its intent is to create authentic conversation, so buckle your seatbelt!
Nancy’s life has revolved around communication since she was a child. She had to learn at a young age how to use her voice effectively - just to be heard in a family of six kids!
Writing became a passion as she grew, and her love of language led her to study English at St.Francis Xavier University. However, her intended path to being a teacher diverged into television due to a lucky series of circumstances. At the ripe age of twenty-two, she became the co-host of Live at 5 - a news magazine with a viewership of over a quarter million people.
Her fifteen years hosting that show afforded her extraordinary experiences - including broadcasting from such varied events as the G-7 and the Academy Awards. She also interviewed thousands of people, from individuals from all walks of life, to some of the world’s biggest celebrities including Oprah, Madonna, Harrison Ford, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Christopher Plummer.
Since leaving Live at 5, Nancy’s career has ranged from other TV hosting roles, to professional speaking, podcasting, acting, and communication coaching. She has developed a passion for helping others recognize, embrace, and nurture their own light, and that morphed into her latest creative project - From Showing Off to Showing UP; An Impostor’s Journey From Perfect to Present. Released in Canada in May of 2022, it became a national bestseller within two weeks, and was then released in the US in March of 2023.
You can find Nancy online at www.nancy reagan.ca, on Intstagram: @novascotianancy, and on her Facebook Author page: Nancy Regan.
You can also catch her uplifting conversations with people from across the country on The Canadian Love Map podcast.
Pasha Malla
PASHA MALLA is the author of five works of poetry and fiction, including the story collection The Withdrawal Method and the novel People Park. His fiction has won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Trillium Book Prize, an Arthur Ellis Award and several National Magazine awards. His work has also been long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Pasha’s latest novel, Kill the Mall, was released in February 2021.
Stephen Maher
The Writers Workshop "Fiction Thrillers" will be led by Stephen Maher, a journalist and novelist originally from Truro, Nova Scotia. Steve is an interviewer for the 2021 MainStage. An award-winning investigative journalist and political columnist, he is the author of three novels, Deadline, Salvage and Social Misconduct. He makes his home on the South Shore of Nova Scotia.
Suzanne Stewart
Suzanne Stewart’s writing has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, The Goose, The Globe and Mail, Saltscapes Magazine, The Antigonish Review, English Studies, Essays on Canadian Writing, The Craft Factor, and Newest Review. She has published a creative non-fiction book, The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons (Pottersfield 2018). Having completed an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and a PhD in English literature, Suzanne currently teaches at St. Francis Xavier University. Read by the Sea welcomes Suzanne as a MainStage interviewer.
Lana MacEachern
Lana MacEachern is a library technician and former journalist/columnist whose work has appeared in Nova Scotian daily and weekly newspapers and The Seniors' Advocate. A longtime Read by the Sea fan and frequent festival interviewer, she is now a member of the festival's organizing committee. Lana writes poetry and creative non-fiction and is working up the courage to submit her work to literary journals. She lives on Nova Scotia's Northumberland shore.
“River John, on Nova Scotia’s lovely north shore, is the perfect setting for Read by the Sea. It’s a jewel of a festival bringing together wonderful writers and welcoming readers for a celebration of the written word. I’d go back in a heartbeat.”
Terry Fallis, two-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour