Prairie Fire is a Canadian literary magazine. Based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the magazine publishes as a quarterly. Prairie Fire magazine was created in hopes to expand Canadians' knowledge and awareness of literary work rather than focusing on mainstream writings of our generation. Included in the magazine are poems, personal essays, stories and even interviews. The magazine has been constructed more so to feature physical characteristics in style of a book, as many writers inside the pages of the magazine have either award winning material, or have been recognized for their pieces. Having the magazine resemble a book emphasizes the literary work inside rather than giving any sense of mainstream material.
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Andris Taskans (married to Katherine Bitney, one of three founding editors of Prairie Fire magazine) has been the editor of Prairie Fire for thirty-three years. He studied at the [[University of Winnipeg. Throughout his career (ongoing), Taskans has made a positive impression on the literary world, not only by editing Prairie Fire magazine; but in addition he supports up-and-coming writers, wrote literary pieces, has received multiple awards and is responsible for discovering many promising writers. Andris Taskans has also created an event a little over ten years ago, which encourages literary enthusiasts to join them at a literary festival named "WordFest". This is a local event which brings many literary writers into Winnipeg, Manitoba, each one reading their pieces to the public. And lastly, the numerous awards the magazine itself has received because of Andris Taskans' management.
Prairie Fire began as a crudely produced magazine called Writers News Manitoba. At first it was published privately. From 1983 to 1989, it was published by the Manitoba Writers' Guild. Since then, it has been published by Prairie Fire Press, Inc., a charitable, not-for-profit organization. The first issue of WNM was published in July 1978. The name was changed to Prairie Fire in 1983 and it took on its present format the following year. WNM arose out of a group called the Winnipeg Writers Workshop (W3). The founding editors were Katherine Bitney, Elizabeth Carriere and Andris Taskans.
The local writing & publishing scene was not as developed in 1978 as it is today. The members of W3 felt isolated both from the established writers of the Canadian Authors Association and from the University of Manitoba crowd gathered at St. John's College. Writers News Manitoba was created with two goals in mind: to serve as a vehicle for the dissemination of information to the widely-scattered writers of this province and to promote the idea that we needed a province-wide writers' organization. After a few false starts, the Manitoba Writers' Guild was founded in 1981 and soon thereafter began publishing a newsletter. It was at this juncture that WNM was freed of its advocacy duties to become fully a literary magazine. Even then, however, it continued to hold as a priority the publishing of work by Manitoba writers. As one critic put it, Prairie Fire's job was to map the local literary landscape.