IFOA Biographies

Debra Adelaide’s work includes two previous novels, The Hotel Albatross and Serpent Dust, three successful collections of stories, and memoirs on the theme of mothering. She has also worked as a freelance editor and book reviewer, and a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Technology, Sydney. Adelaide’s The Household Guide to Dying follows a popular household advice columnist who decides to organize her remaining months on earth – and her husband’s and children’s lives without her – in the form of a book, after learning that she will soon lose her long battle with cancer.

Siri Agrell is a reporter with the Globe and Mail. Her first book, Bad Bridesmaid: Bachelorette Brawls and Taffeta Tantrums, was published in 2007.

Sherman Alexie is the author of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Reservation Blues, Indian Killer, The Toughest Indian in the World, Ten Little Indians, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian – which won the National Book Award – and Flight. He wrote and directed The Business of Fancydancing and also wrote the award-winning screenplay for Smoke Signals. He presents Wardances, a heartbreaking and hilarious collection of stories that explore the precarious balance between self-preservation and external responsibility in art, family, and the world at large.

Bert Archer is a columnist for Toronto Life and a writer for the Globe and Mail. He has reviewed books for various publications and appears monthly on the Michael Coren Show on the CTS network.

Mark Askwith is a producer/writer/interviewer for SPACE, Canada's national science-fiction channel. He has also written graphic novels, including Silencers and The Prisoner.

Diana Athill was born in 1917 and worked for the BBC throughout WWII. For 50 years she was the editorial director of André Deutsch, where she worked with such authors as Jean Rhys, Mordecai Richler, Brian Moore, Gitta Sereny and V. S. Naipaul. Her books include the memoirs Yesterday Morning, Instead of a Letter, Stet, and the Costa Award-winning Somewhere Towards the End, which are now anthologized in a new volume, Life Class. Diana Athill was appointed OBE in 2009.

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than 40 books – novels, short stories, poetry, literary criticism, social history, and books for children. Atwood’s work is acclaimed internationally and has been published around the world. Her novels include The Edible Woman,Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin, which was awarded the Man Booker Prize. Atwood presents her long-awaited new novel, The Year of the Flood, a brilliant visionary imagining of the future that calls to mind her classic novel The Handmaid’s Tale.

Tash Aw’s debut novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, won the Whitbread First Novel Award and a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Aw is Malaysian by birth but now lives in London, England. He presents his second novel, Map of the Invisible World, the psychologically rich tale of three lives indelibly marked both by their own past and the past of Indonesia.

Richard Bachmann is the owner of A Different Drummer Books. A prominent indie bookseller, he was also the recipient of the 2007 Jack Award.

Nicholson Baker is the author of several novels, including The Mezzanine, Vox and The Fermata, and four works of non-fiction: U and I, The Size of Thoughts, Double Fold (winner of the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award), and Human Smoke. Baker’s new novel, The Anthologist, is narrated by Paul Chowder, a poet whose career is falling apart. As Chowder struggles to write, he gradually realizes he is no longer writing an introduction to his poetry, but a tender, romantic, often hilarious novel.

Yvonne Bambrick is a life-long year-round Toronto cyclist. She is Executive Director of the Toronto Cyclists Union, is one of the key organizers of Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington Market, was the original Community Animator at the Center for Social Innovation, and regularly contributes as a photographer to Momentum, Spacing, Dandyhorse, Corporate Knights and Green Power Magazines.

Linwood Barclay is a former columnist for the Toronto Star. He is the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Too Close to Home and No Time for Goodbye, both #1 bestsellers in the UK, where No Time for Goodbye was a Richard & Judy summer reads pick. He reads from Fear the Worst, a riveting new thriller in which an ordinary man’s desperate search for his daughter leads him into a dark world of corruption, exploitation, and murder.