It’s been a bountifully bookish week in Oregon’s biggest city, with lots of events leading up to Saturday’s sold-out Portland Book Festival. Writing workshops, readings, a book fair, and more than a hundred authors and interviewers are taking over all sorts of spaces on and around downtown’s South Park Blocks.

The many authors in town for the big books bash come from all over: politician/novelist Stacey Abrams, historian Jill Lepore, journalistic storyteller Susan Orlean, Spokane novelist Jess Walter, poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, and many more. ArtsWatch has been covering the festival from, well, cover to cover: You can see our stories, including many author interviews, on our PDX Book Fest 2025 page.

But Portland and the rest of Oregon are filled with fine writers, too, and several — among them Oregon Book Awards winners Lidia Yuknavitch, Omar El Akkad, Jon Raymond, Leni Zumas, and Kimberly King Parsons — will be participating in the Book Festival. What’s more, you might see them around and about town any time of the year.

The authors below are Oregon Book Award winners in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. They are some of Oregon’s most accomplished and decorated writers. Their work offers the reader that unique adventure that only the evolutionary miracle of language allows—access to other worlds, both real and imagined.

Omar El Akkad, 2019

Lidia Yuknavitch, 2019

Jon Raymond, 2019

Vanessa Veselka, 2021

Willy Vlautin, 2019

Erica Berry, 2023

Floyd Skloot, 2019

Samiya Bashir, 2019

David Biespiel, 2019

Allison Cobb, 2024

Kate Carroll De Gutes, 2019

Kimberly King Parsons, 2019

Zachary Schomburg, 2019

Lee Montgomery, 2025

Leni Zumas, 2019