Trained scientist Julie Angus (Canada) has written for several publications, including Venus magazine and the Ring, and her photography has appeared in explore, the Globe and Mail, the Guardian, and National Geographic Adventure. Angus presents her book Rowboat in a Hurricane, about her and her husband’s 145-day journey across the Atlantic Ocean in a rowboat. It is a unique record of an amazing ecosystem, its fascinating inhabitants, and the many threats they face.

Nadeem Aslam (Pakistan/U.K.) is the author of Maps for Lost Lovers, a New York Times Notable Book which received the 2005 Kiriyama Prize and was shortlisted for the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and of Season of the Rainbirds. He was born in Pakistan and now lives in England. Aslam presents his novel The Wasted Vigil. The story of five disparate lives that intersect through decades of invasion, occupation, and violence, it reflects the continuation of wars that has shaped, and continues to shape, our world.

Nadeem Aslam photo © Jerry Bauer

Stéphane Audeguy (France) is the author of the prize-winning novel The Theory of Clouds. He lives in Paris, where he teaches the history of cinema and the arts. He presents The Only Son, translated from the French by John Cullen. Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentions his older brother François only two times in his classic Confession. In The Only Son, Audeguy resurrects Rousseau’s forgotten brother in a picaresque tale that brings to life the world of 18th century Paris.

Stéphane Audeguy photo © Hélie Gallimard

In March of 1961, at the height of the Cold War, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg left New York for India. In 1990, Deborah Baker (U.S.A.) moved to Calcutta, where she studied Bengali and wrote In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in biography. In A Blue Hand, Baker captures the complex personalities of Ginsberg’s circle and portrays how India’s landscape of spectacular beauty and spiritual promise, devastating poverty and political unease profoundly altered American literature in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Joan Barfoot (Canada) is the internationally acclaimed author of 10 previous novels including the Scotiabank Giller Prize-nominated Luck and Man Booker Prize-longlisted Critical Injuries. She presents her eleventh novel, Exit Lines, which follows a group of four retirement residents – three women and one man – who become dedicated to small acts of pleasurable rebellion.

Lynda Barry (U.S.A.) has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher. She presents What it is, a book bursting with full-colour drawings, comics, and collages, autobiographical sections and gentle creative guidance. The Chicago Tribune said: “What it is is part diary, part showcase, part manifesto for the power of the imagination. It’s bold and beautiful; angry and sad; joyful and loving and nervous.”

Lynda Barry photo © Fred Milton

David Benioff (U.S.A.) is an author and screenwriter. He adapted his first novel, The 25th Hour, into the feature film directed by Spike Lee, and adapted The Kite Runner for the screen. In City of Thieves, an imprisoned teenage boy and a handsome young soldier during the Leningrad blockade are offered a chance to dodge the firing squad: they must secure a dozen fresh eggs. In a city cut off from all supplies, the pair embarks on a hunt to find the impossible.

David Benioff photo © Amanda Peet

David Bergen (Canada) is the Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of The Time In Between. His other books include the novels A Year of Lesser and The Case of Lena S. and the short-fiction collection Sitting Opposite My Brother. Bergen presents his electrifying new novel, The Retreat, a tragic love story of a forsaken Ojibway boy and the girl whose family moves to the remote island he calls home.

David Bergen photo © Thomas Fricke

Mark Billingham (U.K.) worked for some years as an actor, and more recently as a TV writer and stand-up comedian. His first bestselling crime novel, Sleepyhead, was published in 2001. Though still occasionally working as a stand-up comic, Billingham now concentrates on writing the series of crime novels featuring London-based detective Tom Thorne. He is also an award-winning children’s author. Billingham presents his latest novel, In the Dark, a stand alone thriller about a deadly car crash that changes four lives forever.

Mark Billingham photo © Charlie Hopkinson

Neil Bissondath (Canada) was born in Trinidad and is currently a professor of creative writing at Université Laval in Québec City. He has twice won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and has been nominated for the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award. In The Soul of All Great Designs, successful businessman Alec has set himself up with an interior design firm and a fabricated life. When he meets and falls in love with Sue, both parties have to reconcile their public faces with their private lives.

Neil Bissondath photo © Kate Hutchinson

Dermot Bolger (Ireland) is an award-winning novelist, poet, playwright, and publisher. His many works include the much-lauded novels The Woman’s Daughter and The Valparaiso Voyage. He is currently a writer in residence at Farmleigh House, the official residence of the Irish Prime Minister. Bolger is also the editor of the Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction. He presents his novel The Journey Home considered one of the most controversial Irish novels of the 90s. The Journey Home was recently published for the first time in North America.

Pan Bouyoucas (Canada) is a Greek-Canadian writer, playwright, and translator who has twice been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award. He presents Aegean Tales, two novels translated from the French by award-winning Sheila Fischman. The Other, set on the Greek island of Leros, is the story of a young man who suffers a cruel twist of fate; Anna Why, a bestseller in Quebec and in France, recounts the conflict between two caretakers at the Church of the Blessed Virgin.

Pan Bouyoucas photo © Marie-Reine Mattera

Amanda Boyden (U.S.A.) is the author of the acclaimed novel Pretty Little Dirty. She received her MFA from the University of New Orleans, where she currently teaches English. Boyden presents Babylon Rolling, the story of five families living along an Uptown block in New Orleans the year before Hurricane Katrina devastates the city.

Amanda Boyden photo © L.J. Goldstein

Joseph Boyden’s (Canada) bestselling debut novel, Three Day Road, was published in 10 languages and shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Boyden divides his time between Northern Ontario and Louisiana, where he teaches writing at the University of New Orleans. He presents his new novel, Through Black Spruce, a powerful story of contemporary aboriginal life and the inescapable ties of family, with settings from the forest to the city, from Toronto to New York.

Joseph Boyden photo © Miriam Berkley

John Brady (Canada/Ireland) is the author of the Arthur Ellis Award-winning Inspector Matt Minogue series. He lives in Toronto with his wife Hanna and their children. Brady presents The Going Rate. The most recent installment in the Minogue series, it is a murder mystery surrounding a death linked to the escalating Polish gang violence on the streets of Dublin.

The current Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick, Herménégilde Chiasson (Canada) is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, over 30 plays, and several collections of essays. He is also a filmmaker, visual artist, and curator. In Beatitudes, a postmodern “sermon on the mount,” he has created a tour de force at once compassionate and complex. A meditation on what it means to be human, Beatitudes, translated from the French by Jo-Anne Elder, explores who we are and who we might become.

Austin Clarke’s (Canada) The Polished Hoe was awarded the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the Trillium Book Award. He presents his much anticipated new novel, More. A beautifully affecting story of redemption and hope, More tells the story of Idora Morrison, a mother tortured by the discovery that her son is involved in gang crime. Her memories and her pain unravel as a riveting dissection of her life as a black immigrant in a North American city.

Harry Clifton (Ireland) was born in Dublin, but has lived in Africa, Asia, and mainland Europe. He has published five collections of poetry and has received many esteemed awards including the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. He currently teaches at University College Dublin. Clifton presents his latest award-winning volume, Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994–2004, a meditation on sex, marriage, travel, history, and the light and dark of human happiness in a secular age.

Andrew Cohen (Canada) is associate professor at the School of Journalism and Communication and the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University. His previous books include The Unfinished Canadian: The People We Are, and While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World. He presents Lester B. Pearson, part of Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series.

New York Times bestselling author John Connolly (Ireland) was born in Dublin. He has worked as a freelance journalist for the Irish Times, to which he continues to contribute. His novels include Every Dead Thing, Dark Hollow, The White Road, and The Black Angel. In The Reapers, Connolly’s seventh novel featuring Charlie Parker, the troubled private detective finds the sins of his past come back to haunt him in the form of The Reapers: an elite group of killers of which Parker was once a part.

One of Canada’s most beloved poets, Lorna Crozier (Canada) has published 14 books of poetry, including Whetstone, Apocrypha of Light, and The Garden Going on Without Us. She has also edited several anthologies, among them Desire in Seven Voices. She has won the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Pat Lowther Poetry Award and the Canadian Authors Association Award. The Blue Hour of the Day is a definitive collection of poems that draws on Crozier’s eight major collections.

Lorna Crozier photo © Don Hall

Lewis DeSoto (Canada) was born in South Africa, and studied at what is now the Emily Carr College of Art. His paintings have been widely exhibited across Canada, and his novel A Blade of Grass was nominated for numerous prestigious awards including the Man Booker Prize. He presents Emily Carr, part of Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadian series

Jeffery Deaver (U.S.A.) is the internationally bestselling author of novels including The Cold Moon, The Empty Chair, and The Devil’s Teardrop. His books have been translated into 25 languages, are sold in 150 countries, and have won many awards. His novel The Bone Collector was made into a movie of the same name starring Denzel Washington. In The Broken Window, Deaver mines the dark side of the Information Age as sleuth Lincoln Rhyme returns in a story that sees him trying to clear the name of a cousin framed for murder.

Jeffery Deaver photo © Charles Harris-Corbis

Christopher Dewdney (Canada) is one of Canada’s most articulate and thoughtful cultural commentators. He has published three books of popular non-fiction, including the Governor General’s Literary Award finalists The Immaculate Perception and Acquainted with the Night. He is also a highly acclaimed poet, an accomplished visual artist, and fluent in several scientific disciplines. In 2007, he was the recipient of the Harbourfront Festival Prize. Dewdney presents his most recent non-fiction title, Soul of The World: Unlocking the Secrets of Time, a rumination on the dimensions of time.

Junot Díaz’s (U.S.A.) fiction has been published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His debut book, Drown, led to his inclusion among Newsweek’s “New Faces of 1996,” and the New Yorker placed him on a list of the 20 top writers for the 21st century. Díaz presents his Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, about Oscar de León’s ill-starred quest for love, and his family’s struggle to escape the shape-shifting curse known as the fukú.

Junot Díaz photo © Lily Oei

Don Domanski (Canada) was born and raised on Cape Breton Island and now lives in Halifax. He has published eight books of poetry, and won the 2007 Governor General’s Award for poetry and the 2008 Atlantic Poetry Prize for All Our Wonder Unavenged, his first full-length collection since Parish of the Physic Moon (1998). In this collection, Domanski explores the implicit relationship between matter and spirit, and opens up our perceptions of what it means to be alive in a sentient universe.

Emma Donoghue (Canada/Ireland) is an award-winning writer who has published four novels, three books of short stories, two works of literary history, two anthologies, and two plays. Based on the details of a scandalous divorce case that gripped England in 1864, The Sealed Letter is a provocative historical drama that is strangely relevant to modern issues surrounding women, marriage, rights, and roles.

Hélène Dorion (Canada) has won numerous accolades for her poetry, including the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Prix international de poésie Wallonie-Bruxelles, and the Prix l’Académie Mallarmé, which was awarded for her body of work. With her debut novel, Days of Sand – translated from the French by Jonathan Kaplansky – Dorion presents a captivating, lyrical piece of sensory fiction chronicling stories of life as experienced from a child’s perspective and through that child’s growing awareness of the world.

Hélène Dorion photo © V. Corradi

Roddy Doyle (Ireland) was born in Dublin in 1958. He is the author of seven acclaimed novels, and of Rory & Ita, a memoir about his parents. His novels include Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which won the Booker Prize in 1993, The Commitments, which was made into the 1991 film of the same name, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Paula Spencer, A Star Called Henry and Oh, Play That Thing.

Joe Dunthorne (U.K.) was born and brought up in Swansea, Wales, and now lives in London. His poetry has been featured on the U.K.’s Channel 4 and Radio 3. He presents his debut novel, Submarine. Narrated by 14-year-old Oliver Tate – a boy who is abnormally concerned about his parent’s intimacy issues and, fairly normally, concerned with girls, his best friends, and losing his virginity – Submarine is undeniably bizarre and an undeniably fresh and funny literary debut.

Paul Durcan (Ireland) was born in Dublin in 1944. His first collection of poetry, Endsville, was published in 1967, and has been followed by 17 others, including The Berlin Wall Café and Daddy, Daddy. In 2001 he received a Cholmondeley Award for poetry. Durcan presents his latest collection, The Laughter of Mothers, in which he commemorates his mother as he remembers her – playing golf, reading Tolstoy, providing him with compassion and loyalty, and enduring the ordeal of her old age. He also reads from his previous collections The Art of Life and A Snail in my Prime.

Paul Durcan photo © Hugh McElveen Photography

David Ebershoff (U.S.A.) is the author of two novels, Pasadena and The Danish Girl, and a short-story collection, The Rose City. His fiction has won numerous awards, including the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Lambda Literary Award. He is currently an adjunct assistant professor in the graduate writing programme at Columbia University and an editor-at-large for Random House. Ebershoff presents The 19th Wife, a spellbinding tale that combines epic historical fiction with a modern murder mystery to create a brilliant novel of literary suspense.

David Ebershoff photo © Edie Sanchez

Leif Enger (U.S.A.) is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Peace Like a River. Enger has worked as a reporter and producer for Minnesota Public Radio for nearly twenty years. He presents So Brave, Young, and Handsome, a touching yet rugged story of an aging train robber on a quest to reconcile the claims of love and judgment on his life, and the failed writer who goes with him.

Leif Enger photo © Robin Enger

Anne Enright’s (Ireland) most recent novel, The Gathering, won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. Her other novels include The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, What Are You Like?, and The Wig My Father Wore. She is also the author of a short story collection, The Portable Virgin, and a memoir of motherhood, Making Babies. Her new story collection, Yesterday’s Weather, is a series of deeply moving glimpses into the lives of ordinary men and women struggling with the bonds of love, family, and community in an increasingly disconnected and transient world.

Anne Enright photo © Joe O'Shaugnessy

Cary Fagan (Canada) is an author for adults and children. Among his awards are the Toronto Book Award, the Jewish Book Committee Prize for Fiction, and the Mr. Christie Silver Medal. His picture books include Gogol’s Coat and My New Shirt. His novels for children include Daughter of the Great Zandini and The Fortress of Kaspar Snit. He presents Thing-Thing, a wonderful picture book, with illustration by Nicolas Debon, about a very spoiled boy and the thing (thing) that desperately needs to be loved.

Ildefonso Falcones (Spain) is an attorney who lives in Barcelona. He found fame when his debut novel, Il Catedral del Mar, sold over a million copies, drawing comparisons to Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth. A novel about faith, freedom, and love, Cathedral of the Sea – now translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor – is set during the construction of Barcelona’s greatest landmark, and against the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition.

Denmark’s Karen Fastrup made her authorial debut in 2000 with the novel Brønden (The Well). She presents Beloved of My 27 Senses, her first novel to be translated into English. Taking its title from Kurt Schwitter’s hyper-sensory love poem “To Anna Blume,” Beloved of My 27 Senses tells the story of Clemens and Anna – who went missing long ago in the Libyan desert – as unravelled by their son Tore. Part mystery, part love story, Fastrup’s timeless novel is an excavation of love buried deep in the sands of time.

Karen Fastrup photo © Morten Holtum

Diarmaid Ferriter (Ireland) was born in Dublin in 1972 and is one of Ireland’s leading historians. He has published extensively on 19th- and 20th-century Irish history. He is a regular broadcaster with RTÉ radio and television and is a contributor to newspapers including the Irish Times, the Irish Independent, the Irish Examiner and the Sunday Business Post. He presents his bestselling book Judging Dev: A Reassessment of the Life and Legacy of Eamon de Valera, chronicling the extraordinary career of the most significant politician of modern Irish history

Elena Forbes (U.K.) grew up in London, England, where she lives with her husband and two children. Die With Me, the first in the Detective Mark Tartaglia series, was published to critical acclaim in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. in 2007. Forbes presents the second installment in the Detective Tartaglia series, Our Lady of Pain. When a women’s naked, frozen body is discovered in the park, bound and arranged in a strangely symbolic manner, detectives Mark Tartaglia and Sam Donovan are assigned the case.

One of Ireland’s leading historians, R.F. Foster (Ireland) is Professor of History and a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. He is the author of a renowned biography of W.B. Yeats, of the definitive history Modern Ireland, and editor of The Oxford History of Ireland. He presents Luck and the Irish, “an occasionally angry, sometimes whimsical, and frequently hilarious account of the Republic of Ireland’s ascent from gombeen-land to the happiest place on earth” (Financial Times, U.K.).

One of today’s most beloved writers of magical stories for children, Cornelia Funke’s (Germany) books include The Thief Lord, Dragon Rider, Inkheart and Inkspell. In Inkdeath, Funke continues the story of Meggie and Mo in Inkworld. With Dustfinger dead and the evil Adderhead now in control, the tale has taken a tragic turn. Meggie and Mo, lost between the covers of a book, face a curse of eternal winter – unless they can rewrite past wrongs and strike a dangerous deal with death…

Cornelia Funke photo © Sabine Halbheer

Rivka Galchen’s (Canada/U.S.A.) writing has been published in the Believer, New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and Scientific American, and she was the recipient of a 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Galchen was born in Toronto and lives in New York City. She presents her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances. The evening Dr. Leo Liebenstein's wife disappeared, she left behind one strange, significant clue: a woman who looks, talks and behaves exactly like, and even claims to be, her.

Rivka Galchen photo © Ken Goebel

Award-winning novelist and short-story writer Damon Galgut’s (South Africa) most recent novel, The Good Doctor, was an international sensation, won a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. In Galgut’s new novel, The Imposter, a man tries to cling on to his moral centre in a hot and claustrophobic world. Even as the beauty of the magical veld he visits makes his troubles seem lost forever, shadowy figures from both his past and his present remind him that menace lies always just beneath the surface.

Bill Gaston (Canada) is the author of several acclaimed story collections and novels, including Mount Appetite, The Good Body, Sointula, and the award-winning Gargoyles. In 2002, Gaston was the inaugural winner of the Timothy Findley Award, presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Gaston lives in Victoria, B.C., where he teaches at the University of Victoria. He presents The Order of Good Cheer, a story that alternates between the lives of intrepid explorer and map-maker Samuel de Champlain in 1607, and a British Columbian Grain-mill worker in 2007.

Amitav Ghosh (India) was born in Calcutta and raised and educated in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Egypt, India, and the United Kingdom, where he received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Oxford. Acclaimed for fiction, travel writing, and journalism, his books include Dancing in Cambodia, The Glass Palace, and The Hungry Tide. He presents Sea of Poppies, the first volume in a projected trilogy, set in north India and the Bay of Bengal on the eve of the first opium war.

Biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist Victoria Glendinning’s (U.K.) acclaimed biographies include Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West and Trollope, both of which won the Whitbread Biography Award. She is also the author of three novels: The Grown-Ups, Electricity, and Flight. In Love’s Civil War (ed.) the passionate, life-long love affair between Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie, who met in London in 1941 and embarked on a love affair that would last until Bowen’s death in 1973, is revealed through their letters.

Victoria Glendinning photo © Susan Greenhill

Winner of the Orange Prize and the David Higham Award, Linda Grant (U.K.) is the author of two works of non-fiction and three novels: The Cast Iron Shore, When I Lived in Modern Times, and now The Clothes on Their Backs. Set in modern-day London, The Clothes on Their Backs is the coming-of-age story of Vivien, a sensitive, bookish girl sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents, and of 1970s Britain, insecure about its evolving racial mix.

Charlotte Gray (Canada) is one of Canada’s best-known writers and biographers, and the award-winning author of several bestsellers, including Reluctant Genius: The Passions and Inventions of Alexander Graham Bell, Mrs. King: The Life and Times of Isabel Mackenzie King, and Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill. Gray is the author of Nellie McClung, part of Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series.

Lauren Groff’s (U.S.A.) short stories have appeared in literary publications including Atlantic Monthly and Ploughshares. Groff presents her debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton. In the wake of a disastrous affair with her older, married, archaeology professor, Wilhelmina Cooper arrives back at her hippie mother's doorstep in a storybook town on the shores of Lake Glimmerglass. While there, Wilhemina learns she has a mystery father whom her mother has kept from her, and the lake offers up some secrets of its own in the form of a prehistoric monster hidden in its depths.

Lauren Groff photo © Lucy Schaeffer

Arnon Grunberg’s (The Netherlands) novels Phantom Pain and The Asylum Seeker won the AKO Literature Prize, the Dutch equivalent of the Man Booker. He presents The Jewish Messiah, of which J.M. Coetzee said: “The wit and sardonic intelligence that shine through…make it a continual pleasure to read.” At once touching and grotesque, it is the story of a confused young man from a family with a Nazi past who devotes his life to redeeming the suffering of the Jews…in his own unorthodox way.

Arnon Grunberg photo © Hidde van der Lijn

Richard Gwyn (Canada) is an award-winning author and political columnist. He is widely known as a commentator for the Toronto Star on national and international affairs, and as a frequent contributor to television and radio programmes. Gwyn presents his Charles Taylor Prize-winning book, John A: The Man Who Made Us, the first full-scale biography of Canada’s first prime minister. Volume two of Gwyn’s biography of Macdonald will be published in 2009.

Richard Gwyn photo © Gordon Fulton

Rawi Hage (Canada) was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and later immigrated to Canada. His first book, De Niro’s Game, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world’s richest literary prize. Hage presents Cockroach. Set in Montreal, it follows a self-described “thief” who has just tried but failed to commit suicide. Rescued against his will, he is obliged to attend sessions with a well-intentioned but naive therapist who leads him to recount his violent childhood in a war-torn country.

Rawi Hage photo © Milosz Rowicki

Hugo Hamilton (Ireland) is the author of the New York Times notable memoir The Speckled People and its sequel The Harbor Boys. He has been awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, France’s Prix Femina Etranger, and Italy’s Giuseppe Berto Prize. He lives in Dublin.

Hugo Hamilton photo © Susanne Schleyer

As a journalist, Mohammed Hanif (Pakistan/U.K.) has worked for Newsline, India Today, and The Washington Post. He has also written plays for stage and screen, including a critically acclaimed BBC drama and the feature film The Long Night. Hanif presents his debut, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, a teasing, provocative, and very funny novel that re-imagines the conspiracies and coincidences leading to the mysterious 1988 plane crash that killed Pakistan’s General Zia ul-Haq.

Mohammed Hanif photo © Bond Street Books

Maggie Helwig has published six books of poetry, two books of essays, a collection of short stories, and two previous novels, Where She Was Standing and Between Mountains. She is the associate director of the Scream Literary Festival. She also works for the Social Justice and Advocacy Board of the Anglican Diocese of Toronto. Her most recent book is the novel Girls Fall Down. Set in Toronto, Girls Fall Down is a tale of fear and anxiety in an age of lurking terrorism threats and unknown disease.

Sarajevo-born Aleksandar Hemon (U.S.A.) visited Chicago in 1992, but was unable to return home when Sarajevo fell under siege. He studied English, published his first story in English in 1995, and is now one of the most exuberantly praised young writers of recent years. His short story collections are The Question of Bruno and Nowhere Man. In The Lazarus Project, his debut novel and most ambitious work yet, Hemon interweaves the stories of two young Eastern European immigrants in Chicago separated by a century.

Aleksandar Hemon photo © Velibor Božovi

Oscar Hijuelos (U.S.A.) was the first Hispanic author to win a Pulitzer Prize – for Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Dark Dude, his first young-adult novel, draws on his own experiences growing up in New York City. Leaving 1960s New York and heading west in search of something better, Rico Fuentes arrives at the house of another Harlem exile. Though Wisconsin may seem a world away from New York, Rico discovers people there can be just as violent and judgmental as the ones he left behind.

C.C. (Chris) Humphreys’ (Canada) plays have been produced in Canada and the U.K.. In 2002, his first novel, The French Executioner, was runner-up for the CWA Steel Dagger. Humphreys presents Vlad: The Last Confession. In winter 1481, two powerful men journey to a remote castle on the borders of Transylvania, to hear – and to judge – the last confession of the man known as “The Devil's Son.” He also presents his young adult novel Possession, the last installment in The Runestone Saga.

Helen Humphreys (Canada) is the author of four previous acclaimed novels – Leaving Earth, Afterimage, The Lost Garden, and Wild Dogs – and a #1 national bestselling non-fiction book, The Frozen Thames. Humphreys presents her latest novel, Coventry, in which she recreates the terror of the infamous WWII bombing raid on the city.

Chip Kidd (U.S.A.) is a graphic designer, writer, and editor whose book jacket designs for Alfred A. Knopf revolutionized the art of American book packaging. His work has been featured in Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, Time, the New York Times, and ID, to name a few. He is the author of Batman Collected and The Cheese Monkeys, and co-author and designer of the two-time Eisner award-winning Batman Animated. He presents Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan, the collection of a once-forgotten series of Japanese Batman and Robin stories from the 1960s.

Mia Kirshner (U.S.A.) works as an actor in film and television, most recently in Showtime’s The L Word and Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia. Kirshner presents her first book, I Live Here. I Live Here is a visually stunning paper documentary of the lives of refugees and displaced people, told in their own words or by noted writers and artists. Threaded throughout these accounts is Mia Kirshner’s intimate travel narrative, brought vividly to life in collaboration with writer J.B. MacKinnon and designers Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons.

Mia Kirshner photo © Mike Bender

Hari Kunzru, (U.K.) author of The Impressionist and Transmission, has been compared to Zadie Smith, Martin Amis, and Chuck Palahniuk, and was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. He has written for publications including the New York Times, New Yorker, Guardian, and London Review of Books. In My Revolutions, his third novel, Kunzru explores the intersections of identity, politics, family and idealism as he unfurls the story of a young activist in 1960s London, protesting the Vietnam War.

Rachel Kushner (U.S.A.) has worked as an editor at Grand Street and Bomb and now co-edits the literary and art journal Soft Targets. She is also a frequent contributor to Artforum. Telex From Cuba, her masterful debut novel, is set in the American community in Cuba in the years leading up to Castro’s revolution – a place that was a paradise for a time and for a few. It is the first novel to tell the story of the Americans who were driven out in 1958.

Rachel Kushner photo © Beth Herzhaft

Amara Lakhous (Italy) was born in Algiers in 1970. He has a degree in philosophy from the University of Algiers and another in cultural anthropology from the University la Sapienza, Rome. He recently completed a Ph.D. thesis titled “Living Islam as a Minority.” Lakhous presents Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio – translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein – about a small culturally mixed community in Rome that is thrown into disarray when one of the neighbours is murdered.

Amara Lakhous photo © Basso Cannarsa

One of Canada’s most highly acclaimed poets, Patrick Lane (Canada), is also the award-winning author of the memoir There Is a Season. He has authored more than 20 books of poetry, for which he has received numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry and two National Magazine Awards. Red Dog, Red Dog is Lane’s debut novel. Set in 1950s small-town B.C., it is the story of two brothers, their violent father and reclusive mother, bound to one another by family loyalty and inarticulate love.

Patrick Lane photo © Diana Nethercott

Nam Le (Australia) was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. He has received the Pushcart Prize, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Massachusetts, and Phillips Exeter Academy. He now divides his time between Australia and the United States. Le presents his debut book of short stories, The Boat, a stunningly inventive collection that takes the reader from the slums of Colombia to a floundering vessel in the South China Sea, from New York City to Iowa City.

Nam Le photo © Joanna Chan

Dennis Lehane (U.S.A.) is the author of seven previous novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Gone, Baby, Gone, Mystic River, and Shutter Island, and the book Coronado, a collection of five stories and a play. His work has been translated into 28 languages. Lehane presents his eighth novel, The Given Day. Set in Boston at the end of the WWI, The Given Day captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the crossroads between past and future.

Dennis Lehane photo © Diana Lucas Leavengood

Margot Livesey (U.K.) is the acclaimed author of the novels Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, and Banishing Verona. She is also the recipient of grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Born in Scotland, she currently lives in the Boston area and is a writer in residence at Emerson College. Livesey presents her novel The House on Fortune Street, in which she skillfully reveals how luck – good and bad – plays a vital role in our lives, and how the search for truth can prove a dangerous undertaking.

Margot Livesey photo © Rob Hann

Eugene McCabe (Ireland) was born in Glasgow in 1930 of Irish descent, his family later returning to Ireland after the beginning of WWII. His works include Heritage and Other Stories, Heaven Lies About Us, and the award-winning short novel Victims. He is also the author of a number of plays. In 2007, his novel Death and Nightingales was ranked by the Irish Examiner amongst the ten best Irish novels ever written.

Kathleen McCracken (Canada) is the author of six collections of poetry including Blue Light, Bay and College, shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in 1992, A Geography of Souls, and Mooncalves. A new collection entitled Tattoo Land is forthcoming from Exile Editions in 2009. Her poems have been published in The Malahat Review, Poetry Canada Review, Exile Quarterly, Poetry Ireland, New Orleans Review and Grain, and she has given readings in Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She reads from Mooncalves.

Kathleen McCracken photo © John Reeves

Patrick McGrath (U.S.A.) is the author of Blood and Water and Other Tales, Spider, The Grotesque, Dr. Haggard’s Disease, Asylum and Port Mungo. Born in London in 1950, he moved to Canada in 1971, and later settled in Queen Charlotte Island, close to the Alaskan panhandle, where he began to write fiction. In 1981 he moved to New York and has lived there ever since. He presents his latest novel, Trauma, which follows a New York City psychiatrist who counsels traumatized war veterans returning home from Vietnam.

Patrick McGrath photo © Elena Seibert

Patti McIntosh (Canada) worked in the arts for about 10 years before joining an international development project in Suriname. Since then, her time has been split between management consulting and working for the Junior Global Citizens Club. She presents Ollie’s Field Journal, inspired by two separate articles produced by Médecins San Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) about their work in Niger, Africa. Ollie’s Field Journal encourages children to become active in issues affecting their world, and in particular malnutrition.

Don McKellar (Canada) is an accomplished writer/director/actor for film, television and theatre. McKellar’s film-writing credits include The Red Violin, Last Night, and Childstar, all of which have garnered worldwide critical acclaim. In 2006, he won both a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award for his writing for the musical The Drowsy Chaperone. His film Blindness, based on the novel by José Saramago and already feted at Cannes, opened the Toronto International Film Festival this fall.

Andrew Miller’s (U.K.) first novel, Ingenious Pain, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Grinzane Cavour prize in Italy. He is also the author of the novels Casanova, Oxygen, and The Optimists. Miller presents One Morning Like a Bird. Set in Tokyo in 1940, One Morning Like a Bird follows a young Japanese poet in a timeless story about growing up and growing free of self-delusions, about following the heart and making the right choices in life.

Born in Bombay in 1952, Rohinton Mistry (Canada) came to Canada in 1975. He has been awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the prestigious Timothy Findley Award for a male writer in mid-career – to name but a few. He presents The Scream, a single story, featuring artwork by Tony Urquhart, which was originally published in a limited edition to raise funds for World Literacy of Canada.

Rohinton Mistry photo © F. Mistry

Simon Montefiore (U.K.) spent much of the 90s travelling through the former Soviet Empire, and wrote widely on Russia for the Sunday Times, New York Times and Spectator. He is the author of the international bestseller Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, and the Costa Award-winning biography Young Stalin. Montefiore presents his novel Sashenka, in which a young historian goes deep into Stalin’s private archives and discovers the heartbreaking story of a woman forced to make an unbearable choice.

Donna Morrissey (Canada) is the author of three award-winning novels – Kit’s Law, Downhill Chance and Sylvanus Now – and a screenplay, Clothesline Patch, which won a Gemini Award. She has been called “A Newfoundland Thomas Hardy” (Globe and Mail). In her new novel, What They Wanted, Morrissey explores the wild shores of a Newfoundland outport and the equally wild environment of an Alberta oil rig. A novel about guilt, responsibility, tragedy, and the enduring ties of family, What They Wanted is vintage Donna Morrissey.

Canadian icon Farley Mowat (Canada) has been beguiling readers for 50 years, selling millions of books in the process. Now, this beloved writer and activist gives us his final book: a memoir of the events that shaped his life, Otherwise. Otherwise is a memoir of the years between 1937 and the autumn of 1948, which tells of Mowat’s innocent childhood, being catapulted into military service during WWII, and eventually finding a calling in the bleak but beautiful Barrengrounds where he pitched his first battles against federal bureaucracy.

Farley Mowat photo © Peter Bregg

Dervla Murphy (Ireland) was born in 1931 in County Waterford, Ireland. Since 1964 she has regularly published descriptions of her journeys – by bicycle and on foot. She has also written about the troubles in Northern Ireland, the hazards of nuclear power, and race relations in Britain. Her recent publications include Through the Embers of Chaos: Balkan Journeys and Through Siberia by Accident. Murphy presents her work, Silverland: a Winter Journey beyond the Urals, about her intrepid midwinter journey from Moscow to the Russian Far East.

David Park (U.K.) is the author of six books, including the hugely acclaimed Swallowing the Sun. He lives in County Down, Northern Ireland, with his wife and two children. Set in America, The Truth Commissioner tells of four men in a society trying to heal the scars of the past with the salve of truth and reconciliation, whose lives become linked in a way they could never have imagined. Park pieces together the four characters’ individual stories to create a powerful tale that is moving, insightful, and utterly compelling.

Louise Penny (Canada) is the author of the internationally acclaimed Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series and the award-winning novel Still Life. Penny presents the latest installment in the Gamache series, The Murder Stone. During the Finney family’s trip to an idyllic lakeside retreat for their father’s memorial, old secrets and bitter rivalries begin to surface. The morning after the ceremony, a body is found, and a hotel guest, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, suddenly finds himself in the middle of a murder inquiry.

Richard Price (U.S.A.) is the author of eight novels, including Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan, and numerous screenplays, including The Color of Money, which was nominated for an Academy Award in Screenwriting. He is also a writer for the award-winning HBO mini-series The Wire. Price presents his novel Lush Life, in which he continues to peel back the layers of his beloved city, New York, to examine the crustier side of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Richard Price photo © Ralph Gibson

Francine Prose (U.S.A.) is the author of fifteen books of fiction, including A Changed Man and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the non-fiction New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. She is also the president of the PEN American Center. Prose presents her latest novel, Goldengrove, about a young girl facing the consequences of sudden loss after the death of her sister.