Who we are

Bringing together emerging and established Canadian writers since 2010

Real Vancouver exists to provide a platform for Canadian writers to share original thought-provoking work with a world that needs new perspectives.

Our story

Real Vancouver, originally founded as the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series (RVWS), has been curating, producing, and promoting literary events on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations since 2010.

Originally conceived as a one-time response to the lack of literary programming during the 2010 Winter Olympics, RVWS debuted with a four-week, volunteer-driven festival that featured 44 Canadian writers. That launch—hosted in partnership with W2 Community Media Arts—marked the beginning of what would become one of Vancouver’s most active literary platforms.

Since then, RVWS has produced over 80 events across more than a dozen venues, including the Russian Hall, Iron Dog Books, the Untitled Art Space, INDEX Gallery, and other community-based or DIY spaces throughout East Vancouver and the Downtown Eastside. Our peripatetic model—shifting between galleries, bookstores, and community halls—reflects our core value of meeting audiences where they already gather.

RVWS has collaborated with an eclectic range of literary and cultural partners over the years, including the Griffin Poetry Prize, Geist Magazine, Sad Mag, Poetry is Dead, and the Vancouver Writers Fest. We’ve also built strong relationships with local businesses and cultural operators such as Storm Crow Alehouse, Driftwood Brewing, 33 Acres, and the Giller Light Bash, blending literary celebration with vibrant social spaces.

In 2013, we formalized our operations as a non-profit society with a working board of artists and cultural workers. In 2022, we co-founded the Real Vancouver Writing School, offering accessible workshops and mentorship opportunities to emerging and equity-deserving writers.

While RVWS has always been grounded in a DIY ethos, our vision has remained consistent: to foster spaces of literary expression that are inclusive, experimental, and rooted in the social and cultural fabric of the city. We present work that is bold, hybrid, messy, unfinished—and entirely alive to the urgencies of its moment.

In 2025–26, RVWS will launch Crisis City: Writers in a City Without a Future, a three-part public literary series exploring housing insecurity, poisoned drug supplies, and disappearing public space. These events will take place in community-trusted venues—including Iron Dog Books and the Russian Hall—and feature local and national writers in dialogue with frontline workers and community members. This project extends our longstanding commitment to place-based, artist-centred programming that bridges literature and lived experience.

The first Real Vancouver event occurred on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010, at the Perel Gallery on the 100 block of West Hastings Street.

Crisis City is Coming

This fall, Real Vancouver launches Crisis City: Writers in a City Without a Future—a new literary project shaped by the pressures and possibilities of urban life right now.

We’re living through overlapping emergencies: housing is out of reach, public space is shrinking, the drug supply is poisoned, and the systems meant to keep us safe are stretched thin. In this moment, we’re asking: What can literature do?

Crisis City isn’t about retreating into art for comfort. It’s about using the page—and the room—to stay present with what’s happening. Each event brings together writers, cultural workers, and community members for live readings and conversations that meet the crisis head-on.

We’re gathering in neighbourhoods that know these realities firsthand—Hastings-Sunrise, Strathcona, and the Downtown Eastside—in venues where we have longstanding relationships and where the work can land with care.

We’ll talk about housing and displacement. We’ll talk about grief, survival, harm reduction, and the communities keeping each other alive. And we’ll imagine other ways forward—futures made not in spite of collapse, but through it.

Every event includes free or sliding-scale food, accessibility supports, and a zine or broadsheet to take home—a small record of how we made meaning together.

Crisis City builds on everything Real Vancouver has done for the past 15 years: real writers, real neighbourhoods, real stakes.
No polish. No pretense. Just stories that know where they come from.

Join us.

Land Acknowledgment

Real Vancouver is based on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. We recognize that these lands have always been home to vibrant Indigenous communities, cultures, and governance systems—and that colonization is an ongoing process.

We acknowledge our responsibilities as guests and cultural workers on these lands. This means building relationships rooted in respect, accountability, and reciprocity, and supporting Indigenous sovereignty through our programming, partnerships, and practices.

Reconciliation is not a one-time gesture, but a long-term commitment. We aim to reflect this through who we collaborate with, how we share space, and what stories we choose to center.