On Influencing and Being Influenced

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.

Jared Bland (Canada/USA) is the managing editor of the Walrus and sits on the board of directors of PEN Canada.

William Deverell’s acclaimed first novel, Needles, which drew on the author’s experiences as a lawyer, won the $50,000 Seal Award. Since then he has published one work of non-fiction, A Life on Trial, and 12 further novels, including April Fool, which won the 2006 Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel. In Deverell’s latest hilarious mystery, Snow Job, wily old lawyer Arthur Beauchamp moves to Ottawa, and all hell breaks loose. Wildly imaginative, utterly Canadian, irresistibly funny.

Robert Girardi is the author of five novels. His short fiction has been published everywhere from Tri-Quarterly to the Virginia Literary Review, and his non-fiction has appeared in the New Republic and the Washington Post. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and USC Film School, Girardi has received a James Michener Fellowship and is currently the writer-in-residence at Goucher College in Washington, D.C.. Girardi’s Gorgeous East, a sweeping tale of love and redemption, horror and war, follows three French foreign legionnaires from Mont Saint-Michel to Istanbul, from Paris to the desolate Sahara.

Nikos Papandreou (Greece/USA) was born in Berkeley, California, went to high school in Canada, studied economics and political science at Yale, and earned a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton. After Greek military service and a few years at the World Bank, he quit the world of economics and received an MFA in creative writing. He is the author of seven books, mostly in Greek, and numerous published essays, articles and short stories. Papandreou presents his novella How I Saved the World, about a World Bank economist in Algeria who tries to save the day – and himself.