Reading: Lisa Foad, Jen Hadfield, Sarah Hall, Jean McNeil, Michael Thomas

For her debut story collection, The Night is a Mouth, Lisa Foad was praised as “[a writer] with courage and surprising panache” (Globe & Mail). Foad’s creative work has appeared in Matrix, Exile: The Literary Quarterly, and Red Light: Superheroes, Sluts and Saints, and she contributes cultural commentary to a variety of publications, including the Globe and Mail, NOW Magazine and Xtra. Sexy, dirty and funny, The Night is a Mouth is a potent collection that introduces a new author and fearless storyteller. The book was awarded the 2009 ReLit Award for short fiction.

Jen Hadfield (Canada/Scotland) lives in Shetland, where she works as a poet, writing tutor, artist and sometimes shop assistant. Her first collection of poetry, Almanacs, won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, which enabled her to begin writing her second collection, Nigh-No-Place, in Canada. Hadfield presents this T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poetry collection, which reflects the breadth of ground she has covered and her awareness of the natural world.

Jen Hadfield appears at IFOA as part of Writing Scotland.

Sarah Hall is the author of three previous critically acclaimed novels, including the multiple award winners Haweswater and Daughters of the North, and The Electric Michelangelo. Her work has been translated into many languages and she is currently working on a collection of short stories and a radio adaptation of Daughters of the North. Hall’s decades-spanning How to Paint a Dead Man is a luminous and searching novel about the sacrifices made for the sake of art.

Jean McNeil, author of the Governor General’s Literary Award-nominated novel Private View, is originally from Nova Scotia but has lived in London, England since 1991. In 2005–06 she travelled to Antarctica as the British Antarctic Survey/Arts Council of England International Fellow to Antarctica, and has since been writer-in-residence in the Falkland Islands and on a scientific expedition to Greenland. She is currently a Fellow at Cambridge University and teaches at the University of East Anglia. McNeil’s The Ice Lovers reveals the terrible consequences of unrequited love through an expedition to the slowly disintegrating Antarctic in the year 2016.

Michael Thomas was born and raised in Boston. He received his B.A. from Hunter College, where he currently teaches, and his M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children. Thomas presents his extraordinary debut, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize-winning Man Gone Down. Man Gone Down follows a young black father of three in a biracial marriage, trying to claim a piece of the American Dream he has bargained on since youth.

Nathan Whitlock is the author of A Week of This: A Novel in Seven Days and is the Books for Young People Editor for Quill & Quire magazine. His writing and reviews have appeared in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Maisonneuve, Fashion, and elsewhere.