Non-Fiction Night: Tim Cook, Dani Couture, Lorna Crozier, Graeme Gibson

Tim Cook is the Great War historian at the Canadian War Museum, as well as an adjunct professor at Carleton University. He is the author of No Place to Run and Clio’s Warriors, and frequently appears on radio and television as an expert on military history. Cook presents his 2009 Charles Taylor Prize-winning book, Shock Troops, which follows the Canadian fighting forces during the titanic battles of Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, Passchendaele, and the Hundred Days campaign. Shock Troops builds on Volume I of Cook’s national bestseller At the Sharp End.

Dani Couture is a poet and fiction writer, whose work has been published in a number of anthologies, journals, magazines and newspapers across Canada, including THIS Magazine, the Globe and Mail, and Fiddlehead. She is currently at work on a novel and has a forthcoming collection of poetry, Sweet, which will be published in 2010. Couture presents her first book of poetry, Good Meat, a collection of mostly observational poems that revolve around food, or, more specifically, the varied and complex relationships we have with the things we eat.

Lorna Crozier has received numerous awards for her 15 books of poetry, which include The Blue Hour of the Day, Whetstone and Apocrypha of Light. She has also edited several anthologies, including, with her husband Patrick Lane, Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast. Crozier presents Small beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir, the beautifully realized story of an internationally acclaimed poet’s coming of age. Crozier’s narratives of daily life are interspersed with prose poems, tracing her beginnings with a poet’s precision and open heart.

Graeme Gibson is the acclaimed author of Five Legs, Perpetual Motion, and Gentleman Death. He is a past president of PEN Canada, the recipient of both the Harbourfront Festival Prize and the Toronto Arts Award, and a member of the Order of Canada. He has been a council member of World Wildlife Fund Canada, and is chairman of the Pelee Island Bird Observatory. He presents The Bedside Book of Beasts. A stunning companion to his internationally bestselling The Bedside Book of Birds, it explores the relationship between predators and their prey.

John van Driel is the CEO and General Manager of Classical 96.3, as well as host for the station's A Little Night Music and Yesterday's Hits, Today's Classics.