Vancouver Writers Fest founder Alma Lee dead at 84

Alma Lee, the founder of the Vancouver Writers Fest, has died at the age of 84, according to family and friends. 

A champion for writers and the written word, Lee helped launch the first Vancouver International Writers Festival in 1988 and also helped found the Writers’ Union of Canada and the Writers’ Trust of Canada.

Vancouver Writers Fest events draw 30,000 attendees annually, according to its website. Over the years, the festival has allowed readers to hear from established authors, such as Lee’s friend Margaret Atwood, and provided a springboard for new, emerging writers. 

Atwood told CBC News she worked with Lee in the 1970s to help form the Writers’ Union of Canada, which describes itself as the national organization of professionally published writers.

“She was absolutely essential to the writers’ union and she founded the Readers and Writers Festival in Vancouver,” Atwood said. “These things all take a lot of work and a lot of networking, and she was very good at that.”

Lee was born on May 5, 1940, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the daughter of a bagpipe-maker who was an avid reader. She immigrated to Canada in 1967.

Atwood described Lee in that era as a “little Scottish hippie” who was “always just full of enthusiasm.”  

“All of our things that we were doing in the ’70s came out of an enthusiasm for Canada … that was our motivation,” she said.

Lee played a key role in forming the writers’ guild and served as its first executive director.

“Nobody knew anything about contracts at that time,” Atwood said. “We didn’t know what was supposed to be in them. There weren’t any agents.… Those were some of our problems, and that’s why we formed the union and Alma was the person who organized it all and kept everything going.”

Lee also served as executive director of the Writers’ Trust of Canada, which describes itself as a charitable organization that supports Canadian writers.

Writers’ festival highlighted newcomers

She would later turn her attention to forming the Vancouver International Writers Festival. Speaking to CBC News in 1995, Lee said the festival was designed to “give people a fantastic opportunity to interact live with writers.”

Over the years, the festival has hosted noted writers such as Atwood, Miriam Toews, Carol Shields, John Irving and Salman Rushdie. 

Leslie Hurtig, the current artistic director of the festival, knew Lee for over 25 years. She said that when Lee created the writers’ festival in 1988, she brought over a Scottish format for the literary fest, inherited from the Edinburgh Book Festival.

“She used that same model, which is panel discussions, one-on-one conversations and readings — featuring not only established and well-known writers, but also emerging writers, sharing a stage together,” Hurtig told CBC News.

“She wouldn’t just put Margaret Atwood on stage. She’d put Margaret Atwood on stage with an emerging writer so that their voices could be held up and given equal space.”

Hurtig said Lee was driven and incredibly organized, and that when she believed in something, she would fight for it.

“That could ruffle feathers sometimes,” Hurtig said. “But it also resulted in incredible quality of events, quality of friendships.

“And I have nothing but respect for that kind of activism. I admire it greatly. I think there was a fire inside her.”

Lee was invested into the Order of Canada in 2005.

She is survived by her sons, Kenny and Alan. An exact cause of death was not released, but Hurtig said Lee died at home surrounded by family and friends.