Saturday, July 26, 2008
8:30am-4:30pm

Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
1961 East Mall

Registration - free
(includes a light lunch)

Please register by June 30

Email: lledconf.2008@ubc.ca

Aidan Chambers - Plenary Speaker
Reading and Books in a Digitalizing Culture

For his teen fiction, Aidan Chambers has been awarded the JHunt Award, the Michael Printz Award, the Hans Christian Andersen Award, and the Carnegie Medal among others. Chambers’ work on researching children’s literature has also garnered him an Honorary Doctorate from the Umeå University in Sweden.

Aidan Chambers was born in the country just outside Chester-le-Street seven miles north of Durham City in England on 27 December 1934. He was an only child whose first experience with children’s literature was a collection of Aesop's Fables with coloured illustrations. Chambers worked as a teacher and followed a vocation as an Anglican Monk before realizing his true calling to be a writer. His young adult fiction includes Breaktime, Dance on my Grave, and Postcards from No Man’s Land. With his wife Nancy Chambers, he started a small publishing company in 1969 called Thimble Press, and a magazine, Signal, which is about children's and youth literature.

Aidan has edited many books by other writers, has written for stage, radio and television, and for many newspapers and magazines in both Britain and elsewhere. He has also produced texts discussing the nature of researching and reading children’s and youth literature in Booktalk and Reading Talk. The Department of Language & Literacy Education is delighted to have such a talented writer and devoted scholar of children’s and youth literature share his passion with UBC.