An hour of Canadian poetry, writing and politics

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Gary Geddes and Ann Eriksson - Canadian authors Gary Geddes and Ann Eriksson have spent much of their lives writing about politics in its broadest sense. According to Pablo Neruda, 'Political poetry is more deeply emotional than any other except love poetry. You must have traversed the whole of poetry before you become a political poet.' Neruda's words apply equally to fiction and non-fiction: to write well about civic, public, domestic and internal issues, you must have forded the rivers that lead you to these places. Gary Geddes and Ann Eriksson have made these journeys, Eriksson to the damage and grief associated with fraud, toxicity, homelessness and environmental degradation; Geddes to guilt and pain associated with crime, dictatorship, genocide and war. And yet they have both presented these troubling realities with 'an essential lightness' (to quote Jean-Paul Sartre), constructing works of art that are not only deeply moving, but also charged with sensory detail and engaging characters.

Gary Geddes is a Canadian poet and writer and a native of Vancouver, BC. He obtained his Bachelor's Degree in English and Philosophy at the University of British Columbia and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto. He taught English and Creative Writing at Concordia University for twenty years before returning to the west coast, where he was appointed Distinguished Professor of Canadian Culture at Western Washington University. He has also taught English at the British Columbia Institute of Technology and the University of Victoria. In 2007 he received an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Royal Roads University. He has written and edited over thirty-five books, including seventeen books of poetry, as well as fiction, non-fiction, drama, translation, criticism and anthologies. His work has been translated into five languages. His most recent work of non-fiction is Medicine Unbundled: A Journey through the Minefields of Indigenous Health Care (2017)

Ann Eriksson is also a prize-winning Canadian author, a biologist and an environmentalist as well as being the wife of Gary Geddes. Her most recent novels are Decomposing Maggie (2003), In the Hands of Anubis (2009), Falling from Grace (2011), High Clear Bell of Morning (2014) and The Performance (2016)