READING: Celona, Harris, Lam, Rash, Ridley

Marjorie Celona was born and raised in Victoria, B.C. and lives in Cincinnati. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow and recipient of the Ailene Barger Barnes Prize. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harvard Review, Glimmer Train and Crazyhorse. Celona’s debut novel, Y, tells the unforgettable story of a newborn baby dropped on a YMCA doorstep, and that of her mother, who is just a girl herself.

Joanne Harris has published several novels including the Costa Book Award-shortlisted Chocolat—which was made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp—Blackberry Wine, Five Quarters of the Orange, Gentlemen and Players and blueyedboy. A teacher for 15 years, Harris has also published a collection of short stories and two cookbooks. Harris presents Peaches for Monsieur le Curé, the third novel in a trilogy about Chocolat’s Vianne, who receives a letter from the dead that calls her back to her hometown.

Physician and author Vincent Lam is from the expatriate Chinese community of Vietnam, and was born in Canada. He is a lecturer with the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto and has worked in international air evacuation and expedition medicine on Arctic and Antarctic ships. Lam's first book, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and has recently been adapted for television and broadcast on HBO Canada. Lam’s The Headmaster's Wager tells the story of Percival, a gambling, womanizing, corrupt headmaster at a prestigious English school in Saigon.

Alison Pick was the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Award winner for most promising unpublished writer under 35 in Canada. She has published two volumes of poetry and two previous novels, The Sweet Edge, which was a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book and Far to Go, longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize.

Ron Rash is the author of the prize-winning novels Serena, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River and The World Made Straight, as well as three collections of poems and two collections of stories. A recipient of the O. Henry Prize and the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, he holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University. Rash shares The Cove, the story of a blazing but doomed love affair caught in the turmoil of the First World War.

Ottawa-based writer Sandra Ridley’s first book of poetry, Fallout, won the 2010 Saskatchewan Book Award for Publishing and was shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award. She is also the winner of a bpNichol Chapbook Award and the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, and was a finalist for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Ridley was the winner of Harbourfront Centre’s 2012 Poetry NOW competition. Her latest poetry collection, Post-Apothecary, is a rumination on the pitfalls of existence, and an exploration of the various ailments and cures that befall us.