Margaret Atwood, Lawrence Hill just a sampling of Writers at Woody Point

It's the 12th annual Writers at Woody Point festival in western Newfoundland, and some of Canada's top authors are in town for the event.

Each year, the festival sees authors read excerpts from their novels, as well as musicians performing live, at various venues around Woody Point, a small town located in Gros Morne National Park.

This year, some authors hosting events include Margaret Atwood, Joan Clark, Lawrence Hill, Miriam Toews and Kathleen Winters — among others.

Hill, perhaps best-known for his critically acclaimed 2007 novel, The Book of Negroes, first attended the festival a few years ago.

When he and his family visited, they loved the community and region so much they decided to buy a summer home. At first he thought it was a bit of a risk, but it's paid off.

"It was my wife who really thought this was the thing to do and at first I said, 'Are you out of your mind? We live in Hamilton, Ontario.' To buy a summer property in Woody Point at first stretched my imagination a little far," Hill told CBC Radio's Corner Brook Morning Show on Thursday.

"It's turned out to be a great place to write, a great place to hike and the people are fantastic. It seems like Woody Point and Newfoundland and western Newfoundland is steeped in culture and a love of the arts. Every person you meet seems to either love the arts or do them — or both."

The festival turned out to be a bit of a challenge for Hill, who said there are unique storytelling methods on display at Woody Point.

"Often a Newfoundland writer doesn't just give a 20-minute reading from a book, they stand up and give it. And maybe they'll read for a minute or two, but mostly they're just talking and drawing you into their story," he said.

"It has been a challenge to perform better and be more interesting and to be able to rely not just on the book or the page, but be able to speak in a way that's engaging and natural so it definitely pushed me, but in a great way."

Hill is currently working on a screenplay adaptation of his latest novel, The Illegal, which follows an elite marathon runner trying to survive as a refugee in a country that doesn't want him. That novel will be released in a couple of weeks.

'Whose idea was this?'

This is also the first year renowned author Margaret Atwood is attending the Writers at Woody Point festival, though it's not her first visit to Gros Morne National Park.

Atwood said she's visited the park a number of times in the past, but this was the first time she's attended the literary festival.

"Who would have thought it? Whose idea was this? But it seems to have been strikingly successful. They tell me that tickets sell out in about two minutes every time they go on sale," she said.

According to Atwood, she met some people in Toronto flying to Newfoundland who were unable to find accommodations because everything gets booked up every year for Writers at Woody Point.

"We were talking to some people in the airport in Toronto and they said, 'We just couldn't even find a place to stay there so we're going to L'Anse aux Meadows first and then coming back through Woody Point to the festival,' because I guess it just books up."

Recently, Atwood contributed a literary work to the Future Library Project which started in 2014.

The project involves a forest planted in Norway last year, and every year until 2114 an author will contribute a new work that no one has ever read before.

For Atwood, the unique project presented an amazing opportunity to contribute a new secret piece of work.

"When the 100 years is up, all of the boxes are opened and enough trees will be cut from the trees that have grown to make the paper to print all of these manuscripts, so we don't even know what they will be," said Atwood.

"I think there's just something magic about unearthing something that's been out of sight for a long time, we're always just fascinated with that."

Atwood will be hosting a reading for Saturday Night at St. Patrick's Church, starting at 8 p.m., along with Steven Galloway. The musical act for that night will be Fretboard Journey, featuring Sandy Morris, Duane Andrews, Craig Young and Gordon Quinton.

Sunday is the final day for the festival, with a wrap party that night at the Royal Canadian Legion.