Filipino-Canadian Book Festival
We’re back!
Our festival is August 14-17, 2026.
Watch our social media for our roster of featured authors in June!
After taking a year to rest, reflect, and dream, the Filipino-Canadian Book Festival is coming back.
Join us August 14–17 for a weekend of literature, storytelling, and community as we return with this year’s theme: “Writing Our Diaspora: Literature Across Generations.”
This year, we’re thinking about diaspora as something living, expansive, and ever-changing, shaped across generations, geographies, languages, and communities. Rooted in Filipino/a/x stories, we hope to continue growing the festival as an intercultural space to gather around immigration, intergenerational memory, and the importance of finding community in IBPOC-prioritized spaces.
This year’s visual identity is created by Mar Cortez, a Vancouver-based multidisciplinary artist whose work explores Filipino folklore and pre-colonial history through a contemporary lens.
In Mar’s artwork, diaspora becomes a place where stories accumulate, overlap, and continue. Gestural forms inspired by Baybayin move through the composition like a living script: an echo of migration, memory, and the many ways our stories are carried across time. Layered with regional textile patterns, land and sea references, circular forms, and the bangka, the artwork honours the distinct roots of Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao while allowing them to intersect, blend, and become something new.
At the heart of the piece is the malunggay leaf. Used in folk medicine and everyday nourishment, malunggay becomes a metaphor for the stories that sustain us: knowledge passed down through families, care that travels across generations, and healing that comes from remembering where we come from. Like literature, it feeds us through time.
And the centrepiece Baybayin says Kwento (or kuwento), which is the Tagalog word for “story," "tale," or "narrative," often used to share experiences, gossip (chismis) or anecdotes. It refers to both fictional narratives and real-life storytelling.
More details are coming soon! A heartfelt thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts for making this festival possible.
The 2026 Programming & Marketing Team
Dani, Asia, Nathalie & Dee
About the Festival
Our mission is to celebrate Filipino and Canadian heritage and the unique culture that we are living and creating every day in our diaspora. We hope to honour our ancestral roots and artistic lineages, as well as build and grow revolutionary literary and artistic safe spaces for our kapwa.
2026
We are honoured to welcome such a prolific and celebrated writer to the 2026 Filipino-Canadian Book Festival: Adrian De Leon will be joining us as this year’s keynote!
Across poetry, nonfiction, memoir, criticism, and public history, Adrian’s work has helped shape urgent conversations around Filipino history, diaspora, migration, memory, and belonging. With an incredible body of work published over the years, Adrian continues to expand how we understand our stories across generations and geographies.
Adrian De Leon is a writer and public historian. His most recent books are Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (2023), Balikbayan: A Revenant History of the Filipino Homeland (2026), and Notes from a Wayward Son: A Memoir (2026). Born in Manila and raised in Scarborough, he has lived and worked in Honolulu, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Vancouver. He now lives in New York, where he teaches American and Philippine histories at New York University.
We can’t wait to celebrate Adrian’s incredible work with our community.
More details coming soon. For now, please join us in giving Adrian the warmest welcome!
2024
On July 12-14, 2024 we celebrated Filipino culture, and had a keynote by award-winning author, Catherine Hernandez; there were book signings and panel talks with Fil-Can authors; family-friendly workshops; open mic readings to showcase both emerging and established literary talent; musical entertainment; a marketplace & book fair for Filipino local businesses and our partners, and more that happened this weekend!
The Canada Council for the Arts mandate is to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts. Through its grants, services, prizes, initiatives, and payments, the Canada Council supports a dynamic and diverse arts and literary scene. These activities generate a meaningful cultural, social and economic impact for over 2,000 communities in all parts of the country and beyond. The investments and leadership of the Council help advance public engagement in the arts from coast to coast to coast while also contributing to the international recognition of artists and arts organizations from Canada.
