FLECK, A VERSE COMEDY

Linwood Barclay is a former columnist for the Toronto Star and the internationally bestselling author of nine critically acclaimed novels, including Fear the Worst, Too Close to Home and No Time for Goodbye. Barclay shares Trust Your Eyes, which begins when a map-obsessed schizophrenic named Thomas Kilbride stumbles across an image online that looks like a woman being murdered.

Author, playwright and performer Alan Bissett has written several novels including Boyracers, The Incredible Adam Spark and Death of a Ladies’ Man. Boyracers, and his “one woman show” The Moira Monologues are currently being adapted for film. In 2008, the Glasgow Rangers Football Club reached a major European final held in Manchester where fans flocked and chaos ensued. Bissett’s Pack Men tells the fictional story of three pals and one child who make the trek and, in doing so, struggle to hold on to their friendship.

Actor, director, playwright, editor, and author Marina Endicott's previous novel, Good to a Fault, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, Canada and the Caribbean, and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her first novel, Open Arms, was shortlisted for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Endicott presents The Little Shadows, which follows the story of three sisters in the world of vaudeville before and during the First World War.

Jim Fleck is currently the Chairman of Business for the Arts, Harbourfront Foundation and Ngrain Corporation. Throughout his varied career he has been an active art collector, patron and volunteer. Instrumental in the creation of the Toronto Music Garden and the Power Plant Gallery at Harbourfront Centre, an early champion of Soulpepper Theatre Company and Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, Dr. Fleck is the winner of the 2003 Edmund C. Bovey Award for leadership support of the arts, 2009 Angel Award by the International Society for the Performing Arts and 2009 Ramon Hnatyshyn Award for Voluntarism in the Performing Arts.

Brian Francis’ first novel, Fruit, was a 2009 Canada Reads finalist. It was also named one of NOW Magazine’s Top 10 Books of the Year and was chosen as a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection. He has also received the Writers’ Union of Canada’s Emerging Author Award. Spanning 70 years, Francis’ second novel, Natural Order, is a poignant, compassionate tale about motherhood, acceptance and redemption.

Rodge Glass began writing his first novel in 2002. His works include Hope for Newborns and No Fireworks, nominated for four international awards including the Authors’ Club First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is currently a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. Glass presents Dougie’s War: A Soldier’s Story, a graphic novel about the legacy of the war in the Middle East and the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome on returning veterans.

Helen Humphreys is the author of four books of poetry, five novels, and one work of creative non-fiction. She was born in Kingston-on-Thames, England, and now lives in Kingston, Ontario. Her accolades include the City of Toronto Book Award, Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, Lambda Literary Award, and Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry. Humphreys presents her latest novel, The Reinvention of Love, the fascinating story of a doomed love affair between Victor Hugo’s wife and his friend, the writer Charles Sainte-Beuve.

A third generation actor and writer on both sides of his family, Chris (C.C.) Humphreys (Canada/UK) has acted all over the world. As C.C. Humphreys, he has written six historical fiction novels. Humphreys was runner-up for the 2002 CWA Steel Dagger for Thrillers and shortlisted for the 2007 Evergreen Prize by the Ontario Library Association. Humphreys presents A Place Called Armageddon, an epic new novel about one of Western civilization’s most traumatic events – the fall of Constantinople.

Writer and arts journalist, Kirstin Innes’ short fiction has been published in a number of anthologies and magazines, including The Year of Open Doors, Gutter Magazine, New Writing Scotland, and the McSweeney's/Edinburgh International Book Festival anthology Elsewhere. Her journalism has appeared in the List, Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Scotsman, and Independent. She has won the Allen Wright Award for Excellence in Arts Journalism twice and the Scottish Book Trust New Writer's Award. Innes is currently working on her first novel, Fishnet.

As a cook, restaurateur, food writer, and businesswoman, Prue Leith has played a key role in the revolution of Britain’s eating habits since the sixties. Her columns have appeared in the Daily Mail, Sunday Express, Guardian, and Daily Mirror. In 1995, having published 12 cookbooks, she gave up writing about food to concentrate on fiction and is now the author of five novels. Leith’s A Serving of Scandal follows a 36-year-old mother who falls for the secretary of state, a relationship that must be kept secret but is leaked to the press.

Stuart MacBride is the author of the novels Cold Granite, Dying Light, Broken Skin, and Flesh House. He was the recipient of the 2007 CWA Dagger in the Library for his body of work and was named Best Breakthrough Author at the 2008 ITV Crime Thriller Awards. MacBride’s Shatter the Bones – the seventh installment in the Logan McRae/Cold Granite series – finds McRae and his team on the hunt for the kidnappers of a mother-daughter singing sensation made popular by the TV smash-hit Britain’s Next Big Star.

John Macfarlane is the editor and co-publisher of The Walrus.

A historian and professor, Margaret MacMillan is the author of three books including Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. Paris 1919 was nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction in 2004. She received her PhD from Oxford University and was a provost of Trinity College and professor of history at the University of Toronto.

Born in Glasgow, Denise Mina studied law and later went on to complete a Ph.D. at Strathclyde University. She is the author of eight previous novels, including the John Creasy Dagger award-winning Garnethill, and numerous other short stories, plays and comics. Mina’s DS Alex Morrow returns in The End of Wasp Season, a compelling and multi-layered novel which looks to unravel the tangled web of lies left after one man's selfish actions in a world ravaged by recession.

Andrew Pyper is the award-winning author of five internationally bestselling novels. Lost Girls won the Arthur Ellis Award, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2000, and appeared on the New York Times and Times (UK) bestseller lists. The Killing Circle was a New York Times Best Crime Novel of the Year. In Pyper’s latest novel The Demonologist, a Columbia professor must use his knowledge of demonic mythology to rescue his daughter from the Underworld.

Ian Rankin’s first Rebus novel was published in 1987. The Rebus series is now translated into 22 languages and the books are bestsellers on several continents. He is the recipient of four Crime Writers' Association Dagger Awards, the Edgar Award, and recently received the Order of the British Empire for services to literature. Rankin presents The Impossible Dead, the second novel in the Malcolm Fox series, in which a major inquiry into a neighboring police force leaves Fox and his colleagues unsure of territory, protocol or who they can trust.

Peter Robinson (Canada/UK) has received numerous awards including the prestigious Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and several Arthur Ellis Best Novel Awards. In 2010, he was given the Crime Writers of Canada's Derrick Murdoch Award for his outstanding contribution to crime fiction, the Harbourfront Festival Prize for a body of work and he was also awarded an honorary degree by the University of Windsor. His novels have been translated into 19 languages. Robinson presents Watching the Dark, the latest in the Inspector Banks series.

Emma Ruby-Sachs’ journalism has been published in the Nation and Huffington Post. A graduate of Wesleyan University and the University of Toronto law school, she lived in South Africa for periods in 2003 and 2004 while studying and has worked as a civil litigator in Windsor and Toronto. She currently works with Avaaz, a progressive online organization, and resides in Brooklyn, New York. Ruby-Sachs presents her debut, The Water Man’s Daughter, a page-turner about three women, each of whom is struggling with decisions that will change the course of their lives.

Zoë Strachan is the author of three novels including Negative Space and Spin Cycle. The former won a Betty Trask Award. She is also known for her short stories, essays, journalism, and drama. She lives in Glasgow where she teaches part time in the Creative Writing programme at the University of Glasgow. Strachan presents Ever Fallen in Love, a compelling story that journeys through hedonistic school days to the lives we didn't expect to end up living, and the hopes and fears that never quite leave us.

Meaghan Strimas lives in Toronto, where she works for the University of Guelph's Creative Writing MFA programme. She is the editor of The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen and the author of two poetry collections.

Miriam Toews is the author of five novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck; A Boy of Good Breeding; the Governor Generals Literary Award-winner A Complicated Kindness; The Flying Troutmans, which won the Rogers Writers' Trust Award for Fiction; and her latest, Irma Voth. She has also written one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life.

Simon Toyne has worked in British television for 20 years. As a writer, director and producer he has worked on several award-winning shows, one of which won a BAFTA Award. In December 2007 Toyne quit his job and moved to France for six months, hoping to fulfill a long-held desire to write a thriller. While travelling, it was the eerie sight of a Rouen Cathedral that struck his imagination and inspired the fictional Citadel in his debut Sanctus, a modern-day tale about life shattered by an ancient conspiracy nurtured by blood and lies.

Guy Vanderhaeghe’s previous fiction includes The Last Crossing, The Englishman's Boy, Things as they Are, Homesick, and Man Descending. His accolades include the Governor General’s Literary Award, Pierre Elliot Trudeau Prize, Writers' Trust Timothy Findley Award, Harbourfront Festival Prize, and the Order of Canada. Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Vanderhaeghe’s latest novel, A Good Man – the follow-up to The Englishman’s Boy and The Last Crossing – is a compelling story of love, revenge, and violence set in the late 19th century Canadian and American West.