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The Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence Program

Celebrating 20 years in 2025

The Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence at SFU’s Department of English was founded by emeritus professor Roy Miki in 2004. It was soon supported by the Ellen and Warren Tallman Endowment, and has enjoyed the support of the Dean of Arts, Department of English, and other donors over its 20-year history. A unique aspect of the residency is that it is entirely curated: Writers-in-Residence are selected by an ad hoc committee housed in the English Department. The writers who have taken up the Residency represent a markedly diverse range of established and emerging Canadian poets, novelists, and playwrights.

The Residency has two chief aims: to provide the resident author with time, space, and resources to pursue their creative work, and to provide mentorship to writers in the university community and the wider Vancouver literary community. It has been incredibly successful in both regards, with all past Writers-in-Residence publishing new work in the years immediately after their residencies, and with many of the emerging writers who were mentored by the resident authors themselves going on to publish their own books, often to considerable accolades.  

Anniversary Celebration

  • February 7, 2025 (Friday)
  • 7:00 - 9:00pm
  • ICBC Concourse, Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, Vancouver

Register now

Message from the Chair

Human beings are story tellers and image makers. Words, especially, define us, and they are at the very heart of social life, community, and the search for shared meaning. The literary arts in particular serve to entertain, educate, uplift, inspire, unite and console us. And we engage with the literary arts everywhere in our lives: as the novels and poems and essays we read, as the scripts that become the plays, films, and television shows we enjoy, in journalism and social media—our day-to-day lives are word-woven through and through.

SFU and the English Department especially have long been associated with the literary arts. Well-known, prolific, and award winning writers of fiction and poetry have taught here since the university’s founding. The literary arts at SFU are deeply community engaged formations—involved in literary culture locally, nationally, and internationally. The keystone of this activity has for twenty years now been the tremendously successful Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer in Residence Program. This February we will celebrate, we will remember the program’s late founder Roy Miki, and we will look to the future of writing at SFU.

Celebrated alumni writers

The 20 writers who have taken up the Residency so far are a highly accomplished group, with many of them receiving prestigious awards and critical acclaim. 

5

Governor General's Award winners

4 finalists

4

Writer's Trust of Canada Award winners

3 nominees

1

Giller Prize winner

2 shortlists

Other accolades include:

  • Amazon First Novel Award
  • International Dublin Literary Award
  • Lambda Literary Award
  • Booker Prize shortlist

It was an experience that I thorough enjoyed, mainly for the opportunity to pause and to connect with this wonderful community of writers and thinkers. Writing is a solitary effort—I really value that about it but I also value perhaps more so the ways in which writing connect us to community through dialogue, through network, and through time.

Cecily Nicholson

2016-2017 Writer-in-Residence
2018 Governor General's Award winner

It was a really great experience for a number of reasons. I got to do a writer-in-residence in my city, the people that I got to work with in the English Department, and of course the writers that I got to meet—the quality and caliber of work that came across my desk was incredible to me. I learned a lot about my own writing practice in the process of working with other writers and talking about their work.

Ivan Coyote

2018-2019 Writer-in-Residence
2020 Governor General's Award finalist

The best part of being a poet is the people you meet and the friendships that you make. Being the writer-in-residence at SFU allowed me to experience this in a profound way. The interactions that I had with students, faculty, and members of the community really allowed me to take my poetic practice off the page, and for that, I am truly grateful. 

Jordan Scott

2015-2016 Writer-in-Residence
2018 Writers' Trust of Canada Poetry Prize

With Thanks

The Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence Program gratefully acknowledges generous support from the Shadbolt Endowment, Canada Council for the Arts, SFU's Dean of Arts and Social Sciences, SFU's Department of English, and the Ellen and Warren Tallman Endowment.

Writer-in-Residence Committee

The Writer-in-Residence Committee was established by the Department of English to work in consultation with the resident writer to design and coordinate their schedule of duties and activities. Committee members include Stephen Collis (Department Chair), Cornel Bogle, Clint Burnham, Joanne Leow, Sophie McCall, and a graduate student representative.

Past Writers-in-residence

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