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READINGS AT THE ROSELAWN  
TWENTIETH SEASON - 2013/2014

 
Readings at the Roselawn is one of the very best venues in Canada for writers to showcase their work.
A fun and friendly sold-out audience of 300 subscribers enthusiastically greets each guest author, just one on stage for each evening.

In past seasons we were fortunate in hosting some of Canada's finest writers including Margaret Atwood, Pierre Berton, Mordecai Richler, Jan Wong, Farley Mowat, Alistair MacLeod, Bonnie Burnard, Stevie Cameron, Lawrence Hill, humourists Allan Fotheringham and Stuart McLean. Occasionally we've been lucky enough to present lively personalities like Mike Bullard, Sandra Shamas, Peter Mansbridge, Margaret Trudeau, Roger Abbott, Rex Murphy and Lloyd Robertson.

With no book store in town, the series has now placed 10,000 Canadian books into the hands of readers who otherwise probably would not have bought them. Over the years the series donated more than $30,000 to charities like the Niagara Peninsula Children's Centre, Easter Seals and the United Way. Many signed copies get raffled off later at fundraisers for support literacy, humane societies and summer theatre in our area.

READINGS AT THE ROSELAWN 2013-2014
SCHEDULE OF AUTHORS

 

Thursday, September 26, 2013
CONRAD BLACK, Flight of the Eagle  

 

Brilliant, controversial and a prolific biographer, Conrad Black comes to the stage in Port Colborne to talk about the rise of America from disgruntled British colony to the superpower it is today … with an intro by Henry Kissinger.

 
 

Friday (not Thursday), October 25, 2013
GEORGE CHUVALO

 


George tells his story as Canada's greatest fighter and the tortured life it brought him in A Fighter's Life – Boxing's Last Gladiator.

 
 

Thursday, November 28, 2013
Arthur Black

 


CBC Radio host and TV personality Arthur Black brings his laugh-out-loud humour to the Roselawn stage with 50 Shades of Black. Arthur is one of only two writers to win the Stephen Leacock medal three times.

 
   
  Thursday, February 27, 2014
LISA MOORE, February/Caught
Newfoundland's Lisa Moore has a unique system of writing novels - she sends the publishing House of Anansi Press her manuscripts and they send her back award nominations. From the British Man Booker Prize to the Writer's Trust and the Giller, this "tour-de-force" novelist has been up for them all. Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford summed it up when he said: "Lisa Moore is an astonishing writer."
   
  Thursday, March 27, 2014

TED BARRIS, The Great Escape
Canada's greatest writer on our nation's war history will deliver a slideshow presentation on his latest book The Great Escape:  A Canadian Story.
Once again like Ben Affleck's ARGO, Hollywood took the amazing story of brave young Canadian heroes who executed the greatest escape ever from a Nazi prisoner of war camp and ... turned it into a fictitious piece of American folklore.  In this chilling chronicle of WWII combat, Ted Barris sets the record straight and gives the Canadians their long overdue credit for pulling off the most famous breakout of the war.

  Thursday, April 24, 2014
CRAIG DAVIDSON, Cataract City


The praise for Cataract City is unrelenting; the comparison of the writer to Elmore Leonard is highly flattering. Originally a St. Catharines boy, Craig has set his fourth novel smack dab in the seedy side of Niagara Falls. Cataract City is rough, bloody and beautifully written. The National Post called the Giller-nominated novel "superb, thoughtful and thoroughly entertaining." Not often we get a blockbuster of a book set in our own backyard.

   
  TUESDAY, May 27, 2014

SILKEN LAUMANN, Unsinkable
Unsinkable might be the most revealing and bluntly personal memoir ever written by a Canadian icon.  Canadians adored this courageous rower after an accident ripped the muscle off her shin bone and shattered her ankle only 10 weeks before she made a stunning recovery to win the bronze medal at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.  But we had no idea her childhood of terror and death threats was spent trying to survive from the abusive behaviour of her mother.

Host
Writer William Thomas

Readings at the Roselawn are presented through the generosity of four Port Colborne families:

John & Rosanne

Marsh

John & Darlene

Tuck

Craig Spriegel &

Dr. Jane Parr

George Emerick &

Cindi Pohonick-Talbot