N.B.'s Frye Festival hosts MacIntyre, Lyon

CBC host and Giller Prize winner Linden MacIntyre is among the bestselling writerstaking part in the Frye Festival beginningin Moncton, N.B.,on Monday.

MacIntyre will read from his timely novel, The Bishop's Man, which reflects on the fallout from child sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Churchin an evening devoted to the best in Canadian writing.

On Friday, MacIntyre will share a stage with Annabel Lyon, the B.C.-based author of Writers' Trust Award-winning The Golden Mean, and Nino Ricci, who won the Governor General's Literary Award for his novel The Origin of Species.

All three authors are also taking part in book club discussions and informal chats about their work at other festival events.

Moncton's Frye Festival brings authors together with would-be writers, students and readers for a week of events. The bilingual festival, now in its 11th year, expects to attract 18,000 participants. The year it began it had just 3,000.

The festival begins Monday with an evening devoted to New Brunswick's emerging writers, including Pauline Dugas, Carla Gunn, Dominic Langlois and Vanessa Moeller.

The week'slineup includes award-winning children's author Cary Fagan, author of Jacob Two-Two on the High Seas and Thing-Thing, and Steven Galloway, who penned bestseller The Cellist of Sarajevo.

At Monday's opening ceremony, Premier Shawn Graham said he's been a bookworm since childhood, addinghis favourite book from that timewas Farley Mowat's Lost in the Barrens.

"It was a phenomenal piece of fiction. I remember being under my bedcovers with a flashlight reading late at night because it was well past my bed time or in the summer months curled up on a porch on my grandfather's farm because I read the book five times," he told CBC News.

Getting kids hooked on books is part of the purpose of the festival, said organizer Dawn Arnold.

"More than 10,000 students will have a chance to meet an author a real live author in the classroom or library or auditorium," she said.

Authors will travel across the province to read at schools. The Frye writing contest is open to all New Brunswick high school students.