Lakefield Literary Festival

After a successful 2024 season, the Lakefield Literary Festival is extremely excited to announce that our 2025 festival will be held on July 18 and 19 at Lakefield College School, with our Children’s Tent in our downtown core.
This year, we will be presenting an impressive and animating line-up, along with a festival favorite: Meet the Author Reception!
Our program will feature:
• Friday July 18 @ 7:00 p.m. — Imagining History with Jennifer Robson and Helen Humphreys
• Saturday July 19 @ 10:00 a.m. — Children’s Tent: Lana Button and Nadia Hohn
• Saturday July 19 @ 11:30 a.m. — Family Matters with Martha Baillie and Adelle Purdham
• Saturday July 19 @ 3:30 p.m. — New Dimensions with Sheung-King and Canisia Lubrin
• Saturday July 19 @ 5:00 p.m. — Meet the Author Reception
• Saturday July 19 @ 7:00 p.m. — Jane Urquhart
To get your tickets, or more details about the authors and their books, please visit LakefieldLiteraryFestival.com. Tickets will also be available at Happenstance Books and Yarns in Lakefield later this month.
New this year is a shuttle service sponsored by Selwyn Township. The Shuttle will run from Trent University, stop in Lakefield, and head to each event at Lakefield College School throughout the day on Saturday July 19. We hope the shuttle will encourage even more Trent students and Peterborough residents to take part in this year’s festival.
Our 2025 Festival:
Imagining History
Nothing is more contemporary than historical fiction! Two leading practitioners highlight the diversity to be found in this always popular genre.
Jennifer Robson, born and raised in Peterborough, and boasting a doctorate from Oxford University in British economic and social history, she is the author of seven historical novels set during and after the two world wars. Her latest, Coronation Year, brings a diverse cast of characters together in London’s Blue Lion hotel on the eve of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, where they encounter an unexpected menace that threatens to destroy the celebration. Calling herself “an academic by background, a former editor by profession, and a lifelong history nerd,” Ms Robson currently lives in Toronto
Helen Humphreys is one of Canada’s most prolific and well-loved writers, having published 10 novels, including several award-winners, and as many works of fiction and non-fiction, Her latest work, Followed by a Lark, explores the upheaval of 19th century life through the eyes of the great writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden, imagining his experiences in a world transformed by rushing industrial change. Born in Kingston-on-Thames, England, Ms. Humphreys currently lives in Kingston, Ontario, where she teaches creative writing at Queen’s University.
Family Matters
Two frank and revealing new memoirs focus on the challenges of family life, including mental illness and disability, while finding solace in the most intimate bonds.
Martha Baillie is a Toronto writer who delves deep into the bosom of her own dysfunctional family with There Is No Blue, a trilogy of essays on love and loss that won the 2024 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction. Described by The Guardian as “tough, tender and compelling,” There Is No Blue is “an elegy to the beautiful fight to keep a family together, and an ode to the devastating loss when things fall apart,” according to the prize jury. Martha Baillie is the author of several novels and works of non-fiction. Her previous Giller-nominated novel, The Incident Report, based on her part-time work as a librarian in Toronto, was recently adapted into a feature film, Darkest Miriam.
Adelle Purdham, in the series of essays that comprise I Dont Do Disability and Other Lies I’ve Told Myself, Adelle Purdham offers “a raw and intimate portrait of family, love, life andrelationships,” with a special focus on the challenges of raising a daughter with Down syndrome. A native of Peterborough who currently teaches creative writing at Trent University’s Traill College, Purdham is an educator and disability activist whose prose and poetry has been widely published in literary journals, anthologies, magazines and newspapers. I Don’t Do Disability is her first book.
New Dimensions
Contemporary Canadian literature is international, weaving together widely disparate stories and themes to reflect the shifting identities of the new global reality. Sheung-King and Canisia Lubrin are two of the country’s leading voices in this new literature.
Sheung-King is the pen name of Aaron Tang, a Vancouver-born writer who was raised in Hong Kong and currently divides his time between Toronto and China. His second novel, Batshit Seven, explores the transnational experience of a displaced millenial languishing in Hong Kong and dreaming of Canada. Described by fellow writer Kai Thomas as “a novel of dazzling scope: global and deeply personal, all at once,” Batshit Seven won the 2024 Atwood-Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
Canisia Lubrin, St. Lucia-born Canisia Lubrin made her name as a poet, winning several prestigious awards, before turning to fiction with her first novel, Code Noir. Rooted in the real-life Code Noir, an infamous set of historical decrees governing slavery in the French colonial empire, Lubrin’s novel expands into a dizzying kaleidoscope of stories revolving around black life in the Americas throughout history. Described by The Globe and Mail as “a brilliant, challenging and ecstatic new work,” Code Noir was shortlisted for every major literary award in Canada. Lubrin currently coordinates the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Guelph and is also poetry editor at publisher McClelland and Stewart.
Jane Urquhart
A seminal figure in the modern history of Canadian literature reflects on a lifetime of artistic success.
In Winter I Get Up at Night is the 10th novel Jane Urquhart has published over a storied career that began almost 40 years ago with The Whirlpool, the only Canadian novel ever to win France’s Prix du Meilleur livre etranger (Best Foreign Book Award). Countless awards, citations and honours followed as Urquhart emerged as one of the leading, best-loved literary figures in Canada. Her latest novel, almost a decade in the making, transforms the everyday reality of a Saskatchewan teacher into a sweeping tale of love and loss in mid-century Canada, mixing historical reality with the imaginative intensity so characteristic of her work. Ms. Urquhart lives in Colborne, Ontario