This what we mean when we say, “She’s a writer’s writer!” Wordfest is thrilled to be pairing two Canadian literary heavyweights on the same stage: Maria Reva (longlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the 2025 Writers Trust Award for Fiction) and Giller Prize finalist Zsuzsi Gartner. They will dazzle us with insights into the writing landscape, as well as their latest books: Endling (Reva) and Best Canadian Short Stories 2026 (Gartner). The show includes an audience Q & A and book signing. Shelf Life Books will be on hand with both books, as well as their backlists.
Maria Reva was born in Ukraine and grew up in Canada. She is the author of Good Citizens Need Not Fear and Endling. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere, and has won a National Magazine Award. She also works as an opera librettist. Reva lives in Vancouver
Website: mariareva.ca
Instagram: @revawrites
“A stunning debut novel by a writer who is “bang-on brilliant.” –Miriam Toews
Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails, while her relatives urge her to settle down and finally start a family of her own. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity.
Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. Together they embark on the journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckfull of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. But their plans come to a screeching halt when Russia invades. In a stunningly ambitious and achingly raw metafictional spiral, Endling brilliantly balances horror and comedy, drawing on Reva’s own experiences as a Ukrainian expat tracking her family’s delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines. As fiction and reality collide on the page, Reva probes the hard truths of war: What stories must we tell ourselves to survive? To carry on with the routines of life under military occupation? And for those of us watching from overseas: Can our sense of normalcy and security ever be restored, or have they always been a fragile illusion?
Endling is a tour de force from an author who weaves a story of love, loss, humor, and hope that only she can tell.
Zsuzsi Gartner is the author of the Giller Prize finalist Better Living through Plastic Explosives and of the widely acclaimed story collection All the Anxious Girls on Earth. Her first novel, The Beguiling, was a finalist for the 2020 Writers Trust Fiction Prize and a Globe and Mail Best Book. Her fiction has been widely anthologized, read on the CBC and NPR and won National Magazine Awards. She was the inaugural Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow for Cork, Ireland in 2016. She edited the award-winning fiction anthology Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow and was the founder and director of Writers Adventure Camp in Whistler, BC. Gartner is currently completing her third short fiction collection. She lives in Vancouver.
Selected and introduced by Zsuzsi Gartner, Best Canadian Stories 2026 provides a distinctive sample of the best Canadian short fiction published over the previous year. Geminis are recruited to fight a war in space; an awkward Christmas dinner escalates around the roadkill main course; an interactive fiction game set in early Quebec becomes devastating and unnervingly strange for the player. These 15 stories draw together an expressive range of characters and narratives, and appeal to both longstanding readers and those looking for an entry point into Canadian literature.
Featuring:
Shashi Bhat • Julie Bouchard, translated by Arielle Aaronson • Randy Boyagoda • Grant Buday • Petra Chambers • Sophie Crocker • Bill Gaston • Evan J • Aaron Kreuter • Alex Leslie • Erin MacNair • D.F. McCourt • Rishi Midha • Kaitlin Ruether • Margaret Sweatman
Dazzling Conversation
Libations Bar, with non-alcoholic options
Audience Q&A
Book Signing
75 minutes. No intermission
Dazzling Conversation
Libations Bar, with non-alcoholic options
Audience Q&A
Book Signing
75 minutes. No intermission
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
We’d love to be able to connect directly with you. Sign up here to receive exclusive weekly updates and new show announcements. We promise to make every email newsworthy and entertaining (and by signing up, you help us avoid having to pay to advertise our events on social-media channels).
Join our email list to receive a reminder when shows go on sale.
