CORDELIA STRUBE is the author of 11 critically acclaimed novels. Winner of the CBC literary competition, she has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Book Award, and longlisted for the Giller Prize. Her novel, On the Shores of Darkness There is Light, won the City of Toronto Book Award. Strube divides her time between her Toronto home and her country house in Yarker, ON.

PATMEENA SABIT was born in Kabul a few years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. When she was a month old, her family fled the conflict and became refugees in Pakistan, joining the millions of other Afghans that had sought refuge there. They later moved to the United States and she grew up in Virginia. She currently lives in Toronto.

LISA ROBERTSON is a Canadian poet, essayist, and novelist who lives in France. Born in Toronto in 1961, she was a long-time resident of Vancouver. She has published nine books of poetry, most recently Boat (2022), and two books of essays, Nilling (2012), and Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003). Her 2021 book Anemones: A Simone Weil Project (If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam), an annotated translation of Weil’s 1942 essay on the troubadour poets and the Cathar heresy, is the most recent outcome of wide rime, her ongoing study of medieval troubadour culture and poetics.

MAI NGUYEN is a Vietnamese Canadian author whose debut novel, Sunshine Nails, was longlisted for Canada Reads and named one of the best books of 2023 by NPR and CBC. Her journalism has appeared in Wired, The Washington Post, and The Toronto Star. Raised in Halifax, she now lives in Toronto with her husband, daughter, and French bulldog.

COLIN MCADAM is an internationally acclaimed novelist with a PhD from Cambridge on translations of Ancient Greek—the original language of Daphnis and Chloe. He has written non-fiction for Harpers, Granta, Salon, and Hazlitt, among other journals, and his novels have won or been shortlisted for several prizes including the Amazon Best First Novel Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Governor General’s Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize and the Giller Prize. He lives in Quebec.

WAYNE JOHNSTON was born and raised in Goulds, Newfoundland. His #1 nationally bestselling novels include First Snow, Last Light; The Custodian of Paradise; The Navigator of New York; and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. Baltimore’s Mansion, a memoir about his father and grandfather, won the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, published in 1998, was nominated for sixteen national and international awards including the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and was a Canada Reads finalist defended by Justin Trudeau. In 2011, Johnston was awarded the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award honouring the work of a writer in mid-career. In 2023, his memoir Jennie’s Boy won The Stephen Leacock Gold Medal for Humour and was also a Canada Reads finalist, in 2025.

NAZANINE HOZAR was born in Tehran, Iran, before coming to Canada as a child. Her debut novel, Aria, is an award-nominated bestseller that was published to international acclaim. The Small Ones is her second novel. Nazanine Hozar lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

NICHOLAS HERRING’S head-spinning debut novel, Some Hellish, won the prestigious Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Critics described it as “heart-wrenchingly beautiful,” “irreverent, screwball, and inspired,” and “a winding, raucous ride.” His writing has also appeared in The Puritan and The Fiddlehead Herring graduated from St. Jerome’s University with an honours degree in English Literature and attended the University of Toronto, where he completed an MA in Creative Writing. He lives in Murray Harbour, Prince Edward Island, where he works as a fisherman and a carpenter. Your Breath in Charcoal is Nicholas Herring’s second novel.

MICHELLE GOOD is a writer of Cree ancestry and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After working with Indigenous communities and organizations for 25 years, she obtained her law degree as a 43-year-old single mom, and then spent 14 years advocating for residential school survivors. She earned her MFA in creative writing while still practising law. Her debut novel, Five Little Indians, became a #1 bestseller and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Kobo Emerging Writer’s Prize, and CBC’s Canada Reads, and was nominated for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Giller Prize among other honours. Good’s bestselling book Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada was shortlisted for the Basillie Prize for Public Policy. In 2025, she won the Indspire Award for Arts and was admitted as a member of the Order of Canada.

HOLLAY GHADERY is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. She is the author of Rebellion Box and Widow Fantasies. She is a host on The New Books Network and HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM, and the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. The Unraveling of Ou, is her debut novel.