The inaugural Northern BC Writers Festival launches Thursday July 2nd and runs until the end of the month at various Prince George–Lheidli T’enneh venues. CFURadio spoke with the association’s President Amber Ingham about the excitement of drawing authors together into a stronger community of creatives. Photo Credit - Amber Ingham
July 1, 2026
Kicking off July 2nd, writers of Northern BC will emerge from their ink wells and gather through the month of July in Prince George–Lheidli T’enneh for the Northern BC Writers Festival across many venues & events. Northern BC Writers Association (NBCWA) President, Amber Ingham is excited to bring together local creatives to network, promote northern literature, and strengthen community. Among a number of goals, Ingham stated the event aims to, “connect with writers across genres and across disciplines, but also give you a chance to connect with writers that are within the same ones.”
The festival offers four streams of affordable events for participants to explore: presentations, mixers, workshops, and writing salons. Challenging the idea that a writer must toil in solitude with a tiny lamp, Ingham declares, “Writing is community.” Emphasizing the importance of people further, the festival’s presenters have signed an AI Policy to ensure that content shared at the festival is human generated.
With published works coming out of the community for decades, and Ingham having hosted a writing club locally for about 10 years, events like this have been few and far between. To get this one off the ground, it took a couple years of networking between Ingham, local author Devon Flynn, then Raegan Cote to express their common desire for a festival, acknowledge they couldn’t do it on their own, then finally, “now we had enough people, to convince other people, to join the writing conference.” Seven total founding members now have their pencil tips sharpened as they invite creatives across the region to get writing and bring more Northern BC perspectives to readers everywhere with the motto, “Write the North.”
- Ian Gregg, CFURadio 88.7FM, Due North News, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter