The spring reading series of the Sunshine Coast Arts Council continues on Friday, Feb. 20, at 8 p.m., when award-winning essayist, novelist and quintessential Saskatchewan writer Sharon Butala reads from her most recent work - The Girl in Saskatoon: A Meditation on Friendship, Memory, and Murder.
This non-fiction work found a place on The Globe and Mail's 2008 list of "100 Reasons to Read." Twice short listed for a Governor General's Award, once for her best-selling The Perfection of the Morning: An Apprenticeship in Nature and once for a novel, Queen of the Headaches, Butala has been described as "one of the most significant Saskatchewan writers since Sinclair Ross and W.O. Mitchell."
Committed advocates of the preservation of the short-grass prairie and the unique ecology of the area, Butala and her late husband Peter donated part of their ranch to the Nature Conservancy of Canada to establish The Old Man on His Back Prairie and Heritage Preserve, a home now to such threatened species as the burrowing owl, the swift fox and the ferruginous hawk, and since 2004, a small herd of bison, the first group of bison to roam freely there in over 100 years. Butala has also been hailed for her mentorship of young writers and her work to preserve the Wallace Stegner house in Eastend, Saskatchewan as an artists and writers' retreat.
The reading will be held in the Doris Crowston Gallery of the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre, on the corner of Trail and Medusa, in Sechelt. Admission is free thanks to the generosity of the Canada Council for the Arts.
