Reading: Kyle Buckley, Robert Girardi, James Meek, Kate Pullinger

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

Kyle Buckley is the author of the poetry collection The Laundromat Essay. He currently works at Type Books in Toronto and is a member of the Scream Literary Festival executive.

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.

James Meek (Scotland/UK) is a prize-winning journalist for the Guardian, where he was for many years a correspondent in Moscow and Kiev, and more recently in Afghanistan. He is the author of three previous acclaimed novels, The People’s Act of Love, MacFarlane Boils the Sea and Drivetime, and two short story collections. Moving from the mountains of Northern Afghanistan to London and the waterlands of east Virginia, Meek’s We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is an arresting and timely novel about flawed individuals searching for perfect love.

James Meek appears at IFOA as part of Writing Scotland.

Kate Pullinger’s most recent works include the Governor General’s Literary Award-winning The Mistress of Nothing, A Little Stranger, Weird Sister, and My Life as a Girl in a Men’s Prison. Her prize-winning digital fiction projects have also reached audiences around the world.