ROUND TABLE: The Roads Taken

Toronto-based writer and critic Steven W. Beattie is the review editor for Quill & Quire, Canada’s publishing trade magazine. His reviews and criticism have been published in the Vancouver Sun, Edmonton Journal, National Post, Canadian Notes and Queries, Maisonneuve, and elsewhere. He maintains the literary blog That Shakespearean Rag.

Emma Donoghue (Canada/Ireland) is the award-winning author of the internationally acclaimed and bestselling historical drama Slammerkin, and Room, winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize among others. She is also the author of four books of short stories, two works of literary history, two anthologies and two plays. Donoghue’s latest collection of short stories, Astray, spans four centuries and visits several corners of the globe, telling the stories of emigrants, runaways, drifters, gold miners, counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves.

Andri Snær Magnason writes poetry, plays, fiction and non-fiction, and co-directed the documentary Dreamland, based on his book Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation. Magnason is the winner of the 2010 Kairos Award. Magnason presents two of his latest works. His award-winning novel LoveStar is a surrealistic account of post-technological human experience. His children's book, The Story of the Blue Planet, follows a Utopian children’s society visited by a mysterious adult. It has been published or performed in 26 countries and received the Icelandic Literary Prize, the Janusz Korczak Honorary Award and the West Nordic Children's Book Prize.

Alix Ohlin is the author of The Missing Person and Babylon and Other Stories. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best New American Voices and on public radio’s Selected Shorts. She lives in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches at Lafayette College and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. In her new short story collection, Signs and Wonders, characters are divorced and beginning to date again, childless and longing for children, married and aching for more. Ohlin shares Inside, a novel that begins with a Montreal therapist who stumbles across a man who has failed to hang himself.

Cordelia Strube won the CBC Literary Competition for her play Mortal and the Toronto Arts Foundation Protégé Award. She has also been shortlisted for the Prix Italia and a Governor General’s Literary Award. Her eight novels include Milton's Elements, Dr. Kalbfleisch and the Chicken Restaurant, Planet Reese and Lemon, which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. In Strube’s latest novel, Milosz, a man down on his luck befriends an 11-year-old autistic boy.