LEIC Speaker Series - Julie Salverson

Julie Salverson is a nonfiction writer, playwright, editor, scholar and theatre animator. Recent publications include the books: When Words Sing: Seven Canadian Libretti (Playwrights Canada Press, 2021) and Lines of Flight: An Atomic Memoir (Wolsak & Wynn, 2016). She is a fourth-generation Icelandic Canadian writer: her father, George, wrote early CBC radio and television drama and her grandmother Laura won two Governor General’s Awards (1937, 1939).

She will be discussing her newest book, A Necessary Distance: Confessions of a Scriptwriter’s Daughter (2024). "George Salverson had written over a thousand radio plays for the CBC before he became the first television drama editor for the corporation. He wrote scripts for such beloved series as The Beachcombers and The Littlest Hobo, but he kept very little of his writing, being decidedly unsentimental about his work. When his daughter Julie found a series of notebooks from a round-the-world trip he’d taken in 1963 to work on a documentary about world hunger, she knew she’d found something important; but the writer of these notebooks is not the father she thought she knew. From there Julie Salvarson traces a fascinating web of personal and political history, of storytelling, of culture and it’s shaping and of a man caught in a time of great change."

Host or Publisher Leif Eiriksson Icelandic Club of Calgary