Giles Blunt grew up in North Bay, Ontario, a small city similar to the Algonquin Bay of the John Cardinal novels.
After studying English literature at the University of Toronto, he moved to New York City, where he lived for the next twenty years, before moving back to Toronto in 2002.
The first Cardinal novel, Forty Words for Sorrow, won the British Crime Writers Silver Dagger award, and the second, The Delicate Storm, won the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis award for best novel, as did the latest, Until the Night. He has been twice longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC award.
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Joseph Kertes was born in Hungary but escaped with his family during the Revolution of 1956.
He studied English at York University and the University of Toronto. He founded Humber College's creative writing and comedy programs and was the recipient of numerous awards for teaching and innovation. He was for many years Humber's Dean of Creative and Performing Arts.
His first novel, Winter Tulips, won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour. His third novel, Gratitude, won a Canadian National Jewish Book Award and the U.S. National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His novel, The Afterlife of Stars, was a New York Times Book Review: Editor’s Choice. His latest novel is called Last Impressions.
He was the recipient of the 2017 Harbourfront Festival Prize for his contribution to literature and to the literary community.
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Colin McAdam has a PhD in English from Cambridge University.
He has mentored writers at the Banff Centre and the University of Guelph-Humber. His first novel, Some Great Thing, won the Amazon/Books in Canada Best First Novel Award.
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Anakana Schofield is the author, most recently, of Bina, which won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year award in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize.
Her Giller Prize–shortlisted novel Martin John (2015), was also a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize in the UK, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and named a best book of the year by The Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail, National Post, Sunday Business Post, Toronto Star, and The Irish Times, among others. Her debut novel Malarky (2012) won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Debut-Litzer Prize for Fiction in the United States, and was a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Irish Times, Zoetrope: All-Story, Granta, London Review of Books, and others. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
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Olive Senior is the Poet Laureate of Jamaica 2021-2024 and divides her time between Toronto and Jamaica.
She is a long-standing writing mentor and the prizewinning author of over 20 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and children’s literature. Her recent publications include Pandemic Poems: First Wave (2021) – alphabet poems based on the lexicon of the pandemic, and Hurricane Watch: New and Collected Poems, UK: Carcanet 2022. Her numerous awards include the Matt Cohen Award for Lifetime Achievement and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the West Indies. Her first work of fiction, Summer Lightning, won the first Commonwealth Writers Prize.
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Alissa York has been mentoring writers for over a decade, and has been full-time faculty at the Humber School for Writers since 2017.
Her internationally acclaimed novels include Effigy (shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize), Fauna and The Naturalist (winner of the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction). Stories from Alissa's short fiction collection, Any Given Power, have won the Journey Prize and the Bronwen Wallace Award. Her essays and articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, Brick magazine and elsewhere. In 2018, she won the Writers' Trust Engel Findley Award for a Writer in Mid-Career. Having lived all over Canada, Alissa now makes her home in Toronto. Her new novel, Far Cry, is due out in 2023.
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