Award winning Canadian author Eric Walters paid a visit to Yennadon Elementary on Tuesday, March 3.
The author of more than 140 books for children and youth all the way to Grade 11, Walters was invited to speak at the school by teacher librarian Candace White.
Walters has travelled across the country and even internationally to give presentations to students. He has presented to more than two million children across North America and in Japan, Kenya, and Germany.
This trip was a year in the making.
“I like to see if I can inspire them to be more interested in reading, to see writers as real,” said Walters, just before his presentation to a kindergarten class at Yennadon.
“Reading is the basis of everything academically,” he noted.
His first book, “Stand Your Ground”, was based on a Grade 5 class he was teaching in 1993, who were reluctant readers and writers. The story was set in the school where he was teaching and featured the names of streets in the community and many of the names of his students at the time.
Walters – who is not only a former teacher, but also a family therapist with a masters in social work, who was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 2016 – walked across Kenya for his book “Walking Home”, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania for his book “Between Heaven and Earth”; he hung out with elephants for “Elephant Secret”; and he even hung out at a biker bar for his book, “Diamonds in the Rough”.
“So I do experiential things,” he said. “I love doing that. It makes it real. The things you can’t read about you’ve got to experience,” he said.
White loved how Walters was able to engage the children at each of the Grade levels.
“We’re so excited he is here,” she exclaimed.
“He’s an excellent presenter,” she said, noting that he has even made teachers cry.
A favourite among her students is Walters’ book “Batcat and the Seven Squirrels”, because, White said, it is a story about himself.
“When I told them it was a story from his childhood and that he was the kid who had found seven squirrels, they were beside themselves,” she said. “They all wanted to buy that book.”
Walters’ newest book is to be released in the coming weeks and is called “Julia and Romano” for youth aged 13 and older.
A book set in Campbell River, B.C., where, he said, half the community in city appeared to be lumberjacks and the other half tree huggers.
“So I wrote Shakespeare based on those parameters,” he said.
Loosely based on William Shakespeare’s famous play “Romeo and Juliette”, the book tells the story 16-year-old Julia, Jules, Anderson who moves to Campbell River and meets a cute boy named Cody. As their romance progresses, Jules learns that Cody’s family, the Romanos, owns a lumber mill that is in a legal battle with the environmental agency that Jules’ mother heads, leaving the teens trying navigate their relationship as tension grows between their families.
Walters has won many awards.
He is the only three-time winner of the Ontario Library Association Silver Birch and four-time winner of the Red Maple Award – in which more than 250,000 students participate and vote the winner.
In November 2013 he received the prestigious Children’s Africana Book Award – Best Book for young children – for his book “The Matatu”, presented to him in a ceremony at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.
In 2017 he won the prestigious Sakura Medal give to the favorite book of international students in Japan and in 2020 he received the Governor General’s Award for Literature for his novel “The King of Jam Sandwiches”.
He is also the co-founder of The Creation of Hope, an organization that provides for orphans and disadvantaged children throughout the Mbooni District of Kenya.
Walters’ novels are now available in places as far award as New Zealand, Australia, India and Nepal and have been translated into more than a dozen languages including French, German, Japanese, Italian, Mandarin, Spanish and Portuguese.
For more information about Eric Walters go to: https://ericwalters.net/.