On Getting it Done

Susan G. Cole is an author, editor and playwright and longtime on-stage interviewer at the IFOA. She is the Entertainment and Books Editor at NOW Magazine, and contributes to a weekly blog on nowtoronto.com. At last year's Pride festival, she programmed the Proud Voices stages, spotlighting Toronto's best queer writers. Cole can also be heard on the Media and the Message panel every Thursday on Radio Talk 640.

Anne DeGrace is a librarian, journalist, writer, illustrator, volunteer and multi-tasker. Her stories have appeared in the New Quarterly, Room of One’s Own and Wascana Review. Her previous novels include Treading Water (2005) and Wind Tails (2007). For Sounding Line, DeGrace travelled across the country to her roots in Nova Scotia , where the fog is thick but the people are warm, to recreate in novel form the story of Canada’s most significant UFO incident – sometimes referred to as “Canada’s Roswell.”

Writer, journalist and documentary filmmaker Elina Hirvonen was born in 1975 in Helsinki. She is a passionate traveller and has journeyed independently through 30 different countries. Hirvonen presents her debut novel, When I Forgot – translated from the Finnish by Douglas Robinson – about the way in which childhood experiences forever impact and shape one’s adult life. When I Forgot, originally published in 2005 by Finnish publishing house Avian, has been translated into several languages and has received a number of glowing reviews, including gracing the cover of the New York Times Book Review.

Tessa McWatt (Canada/Guyana) is the author of the novels Out of My Skin and Dragons Cry, which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the City of Toronto Book Award. Originally from Guyana, she now divides her time between Toronto and London. McWatt’s Step Closer chronicles a young Canadian woman’s quest to understand the fate of her two friends following the tragedy of the 2004 tsunami.

Lisa Moore is the author of two collections of stories, Degrees of Nakedness and Open, as well as a novel, Alligator, which were nominated or awarded numerous literary prizes, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada and Caribbean region). Moore presents her new novel, February, about the oil rig Ocean Ranger sinking off the coast of Newfoundland in 1982, and the story of those left behind after the tragedy.