Book Chat: Harriet Zaidman’s What Friends Are For
Join us on September 9th for our next virtual Book Chat with Harriet Zaidman.
To RSVP for this online Zoom event, email .
Harriet Zaidman is a children’s and freelance writer and book reviewer. Her historical novels, set in Winnipeg, are distinguished by their historical accuracy. City on Strike recalls how children from poor immigrant families were affected by the events of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike. Second Chances explores the consequences of the devastating polio epidemics of the 1950s, and was awarded the prestigious Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction in 2022.
Her newest novel, What Friends Are For, was released in November 2025. It chronicles the debates within families and communities when Dr. Henry Morgentaler established an abortion clinic on Corydon Avenue in Winnipeg in 1983. When a teenager from a family that opposed the clinic is assaulted, she is faced with a problem she could never have predicted.
Harriet is the children’s book columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press and writes for The Cottager, Lake Country Live and Living Magazine. She worked as a teacher-librarian for 25 years in Winnipeg, and now volunteers as secretary for the Seven Oaks Education Foundation and is the co-ordinator of the Sheldon Oberman Mentorship Program for the Manitoba Writers’ Guild.
Harriet Zaidman is a 3rd generation Canadian, the descendant of Russian Jews who experienced all the hardship and discrimination society had to offer in the early 1900s. Her successes are a result of their hard work and sacrifice. She’s a retired K-Gr. 8 teacher librarian, a book reviewer for the Winnipeg Free Press and CM Canadian Review of Materials and a freelance writer. She’s written 3 picture books and two novels; her first novel – City on Strike (Red Deer Press, 2019), follows children whose family is caught up in the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike. It has many of her own family’s stories woven in. City on Strike received nominations for the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young Children and the Diamond Foundation Prize.
Her latest novel, Second Chances (Red Deer, 2021), is based on real events. It recalls the tragic polio epidemics of the 1950s, just as the life-saving Salk vaccine was developed. A teenage hockey star paralyzed by the disease develops feelings for a girl in hospital. She’s worried about the fate of her family, which is facing eviction from the Metis community of Rooster Town because of the racist attitudes of the city and greedy developers, who want their land. He must deal not only with his physical challenges, but decide if he has the courage to face down societal prejudices so he can follow his heart.
Second Chances has been nominated for the 2023 Manitoba Young Readers’ Choice Northern Lights Award.
