📚 Kingston WritersFest is back, and it's starting with Yann Martel and Iain Reid on one stage.

Cover Photo: Margaret Atwood in conversation with Ian Williams at the Isabel Bader Centre in August 2025, at the kick-off event for the first Kingston WritersFest after its revival. Photo: Garrett Elliott Photography

On a Wednesday evening in August, the doors open at The Spire and people file in to hear a Booker Prize winner talk about the Trojan War with a bestselling novelist who lives minutes away. Nobody settling into a seat is thinking about the Festival's future, and there is no reason any longer why they should be. It is a good night out in a beautiful old hall in downtown Kingston.

In January 2025, the organization that booked that evening announced it was closing.

Kingston WritersFest is a literary festival in Kingston, Ontario that brings authors and readers together every fall. It was co-founded in 2009 by Merilyn Simonds and Jan Walter, a long-serving Canadian editor and publisher now retired, building on earlier work by Kingston Frontenac Public Library and its partners, and over the years it grew into the kind of event Canadian writers put in their calendars.

Then, in January 2025, after sixteen years, the board announced the Festival was closing, after a debt load that had been mounting for a few years.

Small arts organizations run on ticket sales, grants, and support from the community through sponsorships, donations and patronages. Any one of those going soft for a couple of seasons is enough. What is unusual is what happened next.

Announcing a closure is usually where the story ends. Thanks to our community, this closure did not last the winter.

On February 1, 2025, Kingston WritersFest launched the Angel Campaign, an emergency appeal led by co-founders Merilyn Simonds and Jan Walter alongside board members past and present. The ask was plain: clear what the Festival owed, or lose it for good. By the end of that same month, the money was there, and every artist and vendor was paid in full.

The Festival's own account of the campaign describes donations arriving from every direction, including from “a former volunteer who heard about the need and pressed cash into our hands”.

Writers gave too. The published list of Angel Campaign donors includes Margaret Atwood, Louise Penny, Jane Urquhart, Carol Off, Shelagh Rogers and Armand Garnet Ruffo, along with Indigo and Kingston Thousand Islands Cruises. Authors who had been on the Festival's stages helped pay to keep those stages open.

Eric Friesen returned to chair the board and guide the recovery, and Merilyn Simonds stepped back in as interim artistic director. That September, Kingston WritersFest ran a full festival.

The money still comes from the community, alongside grants from public and private arts foundations that do not stretch as far as they once did. The Festival runs an Author Patron program, where a person, a family, a business or a book club sponsors one author by name. For the August evening at The Spire, the Reiders Book Club are listed as Author Patrons of Iain Reid, which means a local book club is helping put one of the two writers on that stage.

Eric Friesen, Merilyn Simonds and Jan Walter had each committed to seeing the Festival through its revival, and each has since stepped back. Peter Gillespie became chair of the board in June 2026. Eric Friesen continues to champion books and authors in the community, and will keep moderating conversations on the Festival stage. Merilyn Simonds and Jan Walter remain advisors, particularly around fundraising, and Merilyn Simonds is leading a session at the 2026 Festival.

A rescue that ends in a planned handover is a different thing from one that limps along on the same few people. It meant the Festival could be handed to somebody whose job was not to save it, but to run it.

Bruce Geddes took over as Festival Director in April 2026. Geddes is a novelist, has lived in Kingston since 2022, and served on the board of the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning.

Here is where an organization in that position usually gets careful. Run the one weekend a year, keep the costs down, prove it can be done twice in a row before trying anything else.

Kingston WritersFest did the opposite. Alongside the fall Festival, it launched KWF Presents, a year-round series that brings authors to Kingston at times of year when the Festival is not running. The first one is the August evening at The Spire.

Geddes said the opportunity was a rare one, since Yann Martel does not publish often, and that KWF intends to keep taking them as they come. "So pay close attention."

The evening is called Ancient Myths, Modern Nightmares, and it takes place on Wednesday, August 19 at The Spire, the old church hall on Sydenham Street that has been hosting Kingston gatherings since the 1850s.

Yann Martel won the Booker Prize for Life of Pi, a novel about a boy and a tiger in a lifeboat that went on to become an Oscar-winning film. The new one is Son of Nobody, which retells the Trojan War from the point of view of an ordinary soldier rather than the heroes who usually get the lines.

Iain Reid is the Kingston novelist Hollywood keeps adapting. Reid writes short, unsettling novels that people finish in one sitting and then think about for a week: I'm Thinking of Ending Things, which Charlie Kaufman adapted for Netflix, Foe, filmed with Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal, and We Spread, a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award. The next one is A New Kind of Clean, co-written with the filmmaker Ellie Foumbi and published in Canada on October 6, 2026.

Two writers of that size in the same room in Kingston, in August, is not a normal Wednesday.

Geddes told Kingston Spotlight that Yann Martel really wanted to come to Kingston, and that his publisher reached out. "And boom! We made it happen." Iain Reid came on board shortly afterwards. Geddes called the two of them heavyweight figures in CanLit, the trade's shorthand for Canadian literature, and said it seemed only right that they share a stage.

Moderating is Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, the bestselling author of Wait Softly Brother, who lives in Prince Edward County and is teaching a masterclass at the Festival in October. Geddes described Kuitenbrouwer as a great interviewer with a real sense of story, and added that being a terrific person never hurts either.

Tickets are through Showpass, and the full details are on the Kingston WritersFest event page.

The eighteenth Kingston WritersFest runs October 1 to 4, 2026 at the downtown Kingston Marriott, under the theme Words Bring Down Walls.

It opens the night before. On September 30, at the Isabel Bader Centre, Michelle Good appears in conversation with Shelagh Rogers, presented with LodgePole Arts Alliance to mark the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, with a special appearance by Kym Gouchie, the Lheidli T'enneh singer-songwriter.

The Festival calls its main events Authors on Stage, and runs masterclasses alongside them for people who would rather work on their own writing than only listen to somebody else's. The full program is on the Kingston WritersFest site.

Plenty of people in Kingston will hear the words literary festival and quietly file it under things for other people. Asked what he would say to someone like that, Bruce Geddes started with the amenities. "The bar opens at 1pm."

Then the real answer. Reading gets treated as a solitary business, Geddes said, when in fact most of us read partly in order to talk about it afterwards, about the story, or the essay, or the tricks a poet pulled off with language. That is what book clubs are for, and it is what the Festival is for.

Geddes also makes the case that everybody is already doing the thing the Festival celebrates, whether or not they would put it that way. "What's a dinner party but a series of short personal anecdotes about funny things that happened to you? Every planning meeting you go to at work is an exercise in speculative fiction." Every argument you have ever had, Geddes said, whether about sports, politics or the best place in Kingston for oysters and a cocktail, is a collection of essays. Chez Piggy, for the record.

"This festival simply celebrates what everyone does every day of their lives," Geddes said. "There has never been a festival that's more for them."