Celebrate Writing

This letter was originally published in the 2025/2026 PEN Canada Annual Report.

As a teenager in the 1990s, I used to carry around a battered copy of Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, a novel I didn’t understand. Maybe I thought it would impress girls. Maybe I wanted to traffic in that strange aura I could feel emanating from Cohen: the way he used words to create beauty, to send chills down your spine, to seduce. There were no real writers in Lethbridge, Alberta, none that I knew, but I knew they existed in other parts of Canada. Their books would show up under the tree at Christmas: Alias Grace. The English Patient. The Life of Pi. Our country had its own literature, and nobody thought much about it; it was part of the cultural furniture. I was a hick kid from hockeytown. Leonard Cohen was a Buddhist-Jewish sage from Montréal. Canada was what we had in common, and literature was what brought us together.

That time is fading fast. As PEN Canada Advisory Council chair Richard Stursberg documents in his new book, Lament for a Literature, “Canadians now control only a tiny fraction of their domestic book market. It is the weakest domestically-owned publishing sector in the industrialized world.” Over the last few decades, the share of Canadian-published books has plummeted from more than 20 percent of those sold in Canada to less than 5 percent. Our prime ministers publish their books with New York publishers. Those publishers are hardly committed to telling Canadian stories: peruse the latest offerings of some of Canada’s top literary writers and you’ll notice that distinctly Canadian markers have been excised. “CanLit” largely takes place in a kind of uncanny valley—Canada, but not quite.

Meanwhile, our ability to read books—any book— seems to be deteriorating, especially among young people. Surveys show that high school age students engage in pleasure reading for an average of nine minutes per day—compared with an average of 4.5 hours each day spent scrolling their phones. Teachers increasingly assign summaries or excerpts rather than novels; professors complain that students arrive at university without having read a single book in high school. In Survival, Margaret Atwood argued that a Canadian literature was a way of situating ourselves in the world, a way of answering “where is here?” The imaginative lives of young Canadians now unfold mostly within a global anti-culture, utterly unmoored from any organic sense of community, tradition, or roots. “I’m neither left or right / I’m just stayin’ home tonight / Getting lost in that hopeless little screen,” Cohen sang, without knowing how small, or how hopeless, the screens would get.

Insofar as books matter, they are increasingly treated as political weapons. The practice of book banning, skyrocketing in the United States over the last few years, has now arrived in our country. Dozens of books have been pulled from school shelves in Alberta, to satisfy a provincial ministerial order that was probably crafted to curry favour with conservative special-interest groups. Meanwhile, Ontario school boards have quietly liquidated thousands of books for being too Eurocentric and heteronormative; literary “classics” are seen as especially dangerous. Canadians are embracing censorship as a solution to our social and political problems, invoking “harm” to children as a way of scoring political points. These efforts will fail in the end, but have already succeeded in destroying libraries and keeping books out of the hands of people who may have profited from them.

All of this is unfolding against the rise of Artificial Intelligence. Nobody knows how AI will impact our society—whether it may lead to slightly increased productivity, a new utopia of human flourishing, crushing unemployment, or the total extinction of humanity. (Geoffrey Hinton has estimated a 10 to 20 percent chance of the latter within the next three decades.)

More certain is the fact that we are living through the most radical disruption of literary culture since the rise of the printing press. The loss of a shared literary culture, the resurgence of censorship, and the devaluation of reading are all existential issues for PEN, and they are all happening at once. PEN Canada’s role is to ensure that our embattled values—intellectual and imaginative freedom, critical debate, the promotion of literature—do more than simply survive in cloistered corners of the culture, but illuminate a path for the legions of young people yearning for genuine cultural connection. We must lead the way in making the case for reading, writing, thinking—and creating spaces where our ideals can grow.

I invite you to join us at our talks and events in the year ahead: nowhere do our values feel more alive, more electric, than in readings delivered by members of our Writers in Exile community, or in conversation with writers at our events. I ask you to spread the word about PEN Canada, to bring new writers and allies into the fold. And I thank you for staying engaged. I am immensely grateful that we can rally around PEN at this moment. Our mission has never been more urgent.

2025/2026 PEN Canada Annual Report

A Place At The Table: 100 Years of PEN in Canada

Edited by Sarmishta Subramanian
Design: soapboxdesign.com
Illustrations: tarahardyillustration.com

Contributors include José Teodoro, Charlie Foran, Adnan Khan, and Rui Umezawa, with reflections from previous presidents Margaret Atwood, Marian Botsford Fraser, Randy Boyagoda, Haroon Siddiqui, and Grace Westcott.

Read the full report.