Host a literary dinner or tea at your home!

Create a memorable event and help support QWF!

The love of literature and a fine meal make excellent companions. That’s why QWF is inviting you to host a dinner or afternoon tea for your friends or group in the company of one of Quebec’s top writers. It’s simple: you provide the home and the food and invite your friends to come enjoy dinner (for up to 3 hours) or an afternoon tea (for up to 1½ hours) in the company of a professional writer.

Here is just a sampling of the scintillating writers who could grace your table, sharing insights and stories:

  • Mark Abley (Watch Your Tongue: What Everyday Sayings and Idioms Figuratively Mean and The Organist: Discovering My Father in Music and Melancholy)
  • Adam Leith Gollner (The Fruit Hunters and The Book of Immortality)
  • Susan Doherty Hannaford (A Secret Music and The Ghost Garden)
  • Elaine Kalman Naves (The Book of Faith and Portrait of a Scandal)
  • Saleema Nawaz (Mother Superior and Bone and Bread [Finalist, 2016 Canada Reads])
  • Jocelyn Parr (Uncertain Weights and Measures [Governor General’s Award Finalist, 2017])
  • Eliza Robertson (Demi-Gods)
  • Claire Holden Rothman (My October and Lear’s Shadow)
  • H. Nigel Thomas (Fate’s Instruments and No Safeguards)

This is a fundraising initiative. We aim to raise $500 per dinner or $300 per tea to help fund the activities of the Quebec Writers’ Federation—professional development activities such as free four-month mentorships for promising emerging writers, community outreach programs like Writers in the Community, and the annual QWF Awards Gala.

If the idea of hosting friends and an author excites you, we’ll leave it to you to determine the best way to raise the funds. The simplest is to ask each guest to bring a tax-deductible donation for a set amount (say, $20 to $40 for a tea and $50 to $100 for a dinner, depending on how many guests you have). Some hosts have made a larger contribution in order to ask their guests for less. QWF will issue official charitable tax receipts for all donations following the event.

Hosting an author is a unique way to create a stimulating afternoon or evening for your friends, while sampling—and celebrating—the wealth of English-language literature produced by Quebec writers.

For more information, contact Lori Schubert.