Hal Wake prepares for his final Vancouver Writers Fest

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Hal Wake has covered a lot of ground over the years – literary ground, sure, but then there's the ground he literally covers every October. Mr. Wake, who is going into his 12th Vancouver Writers Fest as artistic director, makes it a point to drop in on each event – twice, if he can.

The events are concentrated on Granville Island, but some run concurrently, and he clocks many kilometres over that week. At one point, he considered using a Segway.

"Some people thought I would look dorky," he says. "I never bought that argument; frankly I don't care."

Last year, he did it on foot in comfortable shoes, Rockports. He has also had some sweet rides, including a motorized Razor-type scooter.

"It's got a throttle and brakes and the whole deal. But on a Thursday night when I was using it, I [imagined] a squirrel running in front of me and me hitting the brakes and I just thought that's the end of my face. Not that that's a big loss to anybody, but … dental work is expensive."

That's Hal Wake: always with the jokes and the self-deprecation.

Mr. Wake, 65, is heading into his final festival as director; Leslie Hurtig will succeed him. And while the festival always has unpredictable moments, it is safe to predict this year's edition, the festival's 30th, will be packed with tributes.

"No one forgets meeting Hal Wake the first time," says U.S. literary critic and writer John Freeman, who will attend this year's event. "He's like the literary Santa Claus, with the beard and just the general all-over kind of bearish friendliness."

"Most festivals don't have a figure at the centre of them quite like Hal. They have directors, but they're kind of like traffic-control people that you know are there and protecting you. But in the case of the Vancouver Writers Festival, Hal is at the centre of it … being the closest thing to a den mother a festival I've ever been to has."

Margaret Atwood, who will be at this year's festival too, also compared Mr. Wake to Santa Claus – and evoked a bear comparison as well.

"He's fuzzy. He's wuzzy. He's sort of bear-like," she said, on the phone from Chicago, where she was receiving the 2017 Carl Sandburg Literary Award. "If you wanted to write a really devious crime noir novel, you might put this affable person into the role of a villain, but it would be very hard to do."

Like many of the authors who have come to the festival during Mr. Wake's tenure, Ms. Atwood first met Mr. Wake in the 1980s when he was a producer specializing in books for Morningside with Peter Gzowski at CBC Radio. (Before that, Mr. Wake worked at the local CBC in Vancouver and in co-op radio.) After years at Morningside, he returned to Vancouver and hosted CBC's local morning show. He later taught journalism and worked in communications. Then writers' festival founder Alma Lee retired.

"I wanted the job more than anything else at the time. And I spent months preparing to get it," Mr. Wake says.

He inherited a solid festival and continued Ms. Lee's legacy of staging compelling events and attracting first-rate authors.

While CanLit was his strength, he had to bone up on international authors, he says. It paid off. He has a knack, Mr. Freeman says, for choosing writers everyone will be reading in a year – or five years. He also likes to construct panels where big names share the stage with emerging authors. For the lesser known writer, that is a huge opportunity.

"It means everything," says Mr. Freeman, former editor of the literary magazine Granta and now publishing his own anthology, Freeman's. "One of the hardest things now in the world that we live in and how books are sold is getting people to know that you exist."

Mr. Wake is also a solid moderator and interviewer. And he gets a huge kick out of panel curation with different voices and perspectives that can lead to onstage magic.

"You watch an idea being built in front of your eyes, knowing that it won't happen again and that if you weren't there, you've missed it," he says. "And when you are there, it's like a gift. It's like the shooting star you see at night or the killer whale you glimpse in the distance."

His tenure has not been without controversy; Mr. Wake was taken to task publicly and dealt with some internal dissension after he offered personal support for author Steven Galloway – a friend – on Facebook and to media after the University of British Columbia suspended Mr. Galloway as a result of undisclosed "serious" allegations.

"There were strains, no question, but nothing really that wasn't resolved," Mr. Wake says.

This year, the festival will feature a record number of writers – 110 – and as of last week, it was ahead on ticket revenue.

Ms. Atwood's interview with Andrew O'Hagan sold out so quickly that Mr. Wake asked her to do another one, which he will conduct. Ms. Atwood, a literary star at any time, has become an even bigger draw with the award-winning TV adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale, and now Alias Grace ("two shows in one year, both with bonnets," she quips) – but how could she say no?

"He'll be in good hands," Ms. Atwood says. "I won't be mean to him."

The Vancouver Writers Fest runs until Oct. 22. Marsha Lederman will moderate two panels.