Alumnus’ small press makes big Giller impact

By Adela Talbot, BA'08, MA'11

All Dan Wells, MA'97 (History), wanted was a life lived in books. And it was happenstance, he said, that made such a life possible.

Nearly 20 years ago, while Wells was finishing his History MA at Western, he stumbled upon a large collection – thousands upon thousands of books – at a Gardner Galleries auction. The library once belonged to an English professor, and for $100, Wells took it home.

“At that point, I had been in university for six years, and I thought I’d take a break. The real genesis of everything was sort of accidental – that library provided the basis of a bookstore,” he said, noting he thought it would be a good respite, to open a store after finishing his MA in 1997.

“Everyone said a bookstore would fail, but I could get it out of my blood, and then I’d go on and do a PhD. This is what I assumed my career path would be. But it (the store) didn’t fail,” he said.

Today, Biblioasis – the store Wells founded in 1998 – is not just a quaint, independent bookshop in Windsor’s Walkerville District. It’s also a publishing house, one that counts two of its recent titles among the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist – Arvida by Samuel Archibald and Martin John by Anakana Schofield. A third title – Confidence by Russell Smith – was included on the longlist and was nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize last month.

The recipient of the Giller Prize will be announced Nov. 10 and will receive a $100,000 award. The other finalists will receive $10,000 each.