The Monica Miller Memorial Lecture is held annually by the MacEwan University Department of English. The event celebrates women’s voices in literature and creative writing, in commemoration of Monica Miller’s life and broadcasting career.
CKUA listeners around the world know Monica was passionate about music. However, she was just as passionate about literature, particularly works by female authors. This annual lecture, typically held in October, features a prominent female writer, with the aim of amplifying women’s voices in literature.
For more information, contact the Department of English.
Featured authors
2025
Lorna Crozier
Lorna Crozier is an Officer of the Order of Canada and the recipient of several honourary doctorates that acknowledge her contribution to Canadian literature. An award-winning author, her accolades include the Governor General’s Award and three Pat Lowther Memorial Awards. She has written two memoirs and twenty-two books of poetry, most recently, After That, What the Soul Doesn’t Want (nominated for the Governor General’s Award). The collection The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things was listed as one of The Globe and Mail’s top 100 books of 2012.
2024
Alissa York
Alissa York’s internationally acclaimed novels include Effigy (shortlisted for the Giller Prize), Fauna, The Naturalist (winner of the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction) and Far Cry. Stories from Alissa’s short fiction collection, Any Given Power, won the Journey Prize and the Bronwen Wallace Award. Her essays and articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, Brick magazine and elsewhere. In 2018, Alissa won the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award for a Writer in Mid-Career. She lives in Stratford, Ontario and teaches at the Humber School for Writers.
2023
Suzette Mayr
Suzette Mayr is the author of The Sleeping Car Porter, winner of the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Award, the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction and the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize. Mayr’s other novels have won the ReLit Award and been nominated for numerous other prizes including the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book in the Canada-Caribbean Region. Mayr teaches creative writing at the University of Calgary and is a Killam Laureate.
2022
Jane Urquhart
Jane Urquhart is the author of many internationally acclaimed novels, among them The Whirlpool, which received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger in France; Away, winner of the Trillium Award; The Underpainter, winner of the Governor General’s Award and a finalist for The Orange Prize in the UK; and The Stone Carvers, which was a finalist for The Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and for Britain’s Booker Prize. She is the author of a collection of short fiction, four books of poetry a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery. She was editor of The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories. Her most recent novel, The Night Stages, was released in 2015.
Consider contributing to the Monica Miller Creative Writing Award endowment fund, designed to support female students in their graduating year of a creative writing program.