IFOA Midland: Lauren Kirshner, Olive Senior, Eleanor Thom, Mary Tilberg

Lauren Kirshner is the author of the novel Where We Have to Go. Her fiction, poetry and journalism have appeared in Exile, The Globe and Mail and Quill & Quire, among others.

Olive Senior (Canada/Jamaica) is the author of four books of poetry, three collections of short stories and several award-winning non-fiction works on Caribbean culture. Some of her many awards and honours include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, F.G. Bressani Literary Prize, and the Norman Washington Manley Foundation Award for Excellence, which celebrates the preservation of Jamaica’s cultural heritage. Senior presents Arrival of the Snake-Woman, a collection of powerful and poignant stories that spans a period of about 150 years in Jamaica; beginning with the closing days of slavery in 1838.

Eleanor Thom’s (Scotland/UK) linguistics research, The Gaelic Gasp and its North Atlantic Cousins, was the first of its kind conducted in Britain. She was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship by the Scottish Arts Council and the National Library of Scotland in 2008 and is currently an Honorary Writer in Residence for the French Department at Glasgow University. Thom presents her award-winning debut, The Tin-Kin, a novel based on photos, artifacts and memories of her mother’s travelling family.

Eleanor Thom appears at IFOA as part of Writing Scotland.

Mary Tilberg grew up in Morocco and Liberia before moving to Toronto as a teenager. She holds a B.Ed. and an Honours B.A. in Creative Writing from York University. Her poetry and short fiction are regularly published in Canadian literary journals. Tilberg presents the frontier story Oonagh, a tale of two unlikely lovers braving the dangers of a new land to build a life together.