Show Notes
Freedom to read can never be taken for granted. Even in Canada, a free country by world standards, books and magazines are banned at the border. Schools and libraries are regularly asked to remove books and magazines from their shelves. Few of these stories make headlines, but they affect the right of Canadians to decide for themselves what they choose to read. Our neighbours to the south seem to be banning another batch of books or covering up more library shelves and display cases every week.
What effect does this have on artists, activists, and the librarians whose job it is to challenge us with new ideas and concepts, as well as put books containing those ideas into the hands of readers everyday?
We’ll talk to people in the Alberta literary community about the importance of intellectual freedom and what the lasting legacy of banning books really is.
More from Writers' Guild of Alberta Podcast
We say literary merit is a subjective topic, but do we really think that? Is it a matter of taste or is there criteria that defines why some works are thought to carry more literary weight than others? How do we decide which works deserve literary prizes, or what is included in the CanLit canon? How do we judge the qualifications of who does the judging for said prizes? Does how we define “literary merit” exclude genre fiction or marginalized writers? Since the topic seems to be so subjective, would we say determining literary merit is a community initiative? Join our September panelists as they examine these types of questions on the subject of literary merit and more.
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February 2026 Controversy at Noon: Are Children’s Writers the Ultimate Freedom Fighters? by Writers' Guild of Alberta
November 2025 Controversy at Noon: The Things They Never Told Me About Publishing by Writers' Guild of Alberta