About Talonbooks

Mandate
Talonbooks’ mandate is to publish works of the highest literary excellence by diverse Canadian and Indigenous authors and to work with all of our authors to nurture their national and international literary careers. Our focus is on poetry, drama, Québec literature in translation, and texts that display a commitment to social justice.

Principal Accomplishments
With more than 800 titles in print, Talonbooks has received over 300 awards. We have built and keep in print one of the finest and most diverse literary lists in Canada.

Role in Canadian Publishing
Talonbooks’ dedication to the publication of more than five decades of excellent literary work has earned our publishing house the privilege of being one of the pre-eminent independent Anglophone literary presses in Canada. Talon is one of the pioneering “first generation” of Canadian literary publishers of the 1960s, consistently maintaining our success and independence over the past fifty-eight years. We are one of Canada’s largest independent publishers of drama and poetry; have a long history of publishing translations from Quebec; and maintain one of the largest lists of Indigenous voices.

Brief History
Talon was first established as a poetry magazine with an editorial collective based at Magee High School in Vancouver in 1963. The magazine moved with its founders to the University of British Columbia in 1965. By 1967, the magazine had published so many young writers, Talon decided to become a book publisher for its authors.

Starting out with poetry, including the first books of Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate, George Bowering (Sticks & Stones), and Ken Belford’s Post Electric Cave Man respectively; the press diversified into drama with Beverley Simons’s Crabdance, George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, and James Reaney’s Colours in the Dark in 1969; into fiction with Jane Rule’s Desert of the Heart and Audrey Thomas’s Songs My Mother Taught Me in 1973; into Québec literature in translation with Robert Gurik’s The Trial of Jean Baptiste M. and Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles Soeurs in 1975; and into non-fiction with the collected works of ethnographer Charles Hill-Tout, The Salish People, Volumes I–IV, in 1979.

In the early 1980s, the press experimented with publishing highly successful commercial titles. However, we found that these not only took too much time away from new literary work but also threatened, by putting at too great a risk, the company’s solid literary backlist. For these reasons, the press returned to its original, exclusively literary mandate in 1985.

Over the past decade, Talon has diversified its literary non-fiction list to include works on global flash-points in the Middle East and the Balkans, Indigenous rights, history and the movement toward reconciliation, and on other Canadian issues and politics.

Talon is a member of the following organizations:
The Literary Press Group
The Association of Book Publishers of B.C.
Canadian Booksellers Association
The Canadian Conference of the Arts
The Association of Canadian Publishers