This Writing Life: Rewards and Challenges of Being a Writer

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.

Valerio Massimo Manfredi is professor of classical archaeology at Luigi Bocconi University in Milan. He has published ten works of fiction, including the Alexander trilogy, which has been translated into 24 languages in 38 countries. He has written and hosted documentaries on the ancient world as well as screenplays for cinema and television. Manfredi’s political thriller The Ides of March is a gripping tale of ancient Rome that chronicles the intrigue and action surrounding one of the most crucial turning points in the history of western civilization.

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.

Ingo Schulze’s first book, 33 Moments of Happiness, won two German literary awards, the prestigious Alfred Döblin Prize and the Ernst Willner Prize for Literature. New Lives begins in East Germany in 1990, where Enrico Türmer – man of the theatre, aspiring novelist – has turned his back on the art world and joined a startup newspaper. Türmer becomes obsessed with personal gain, and in a series of letters, muses on his capitalist ventures and latent worldly ambitions. His reinvention puts a mirror both to life in the old Germany, and life in the Germany just taking form.

Antanas Sileika is the author of Dinner at the End of the World, Woman in Bronze, and Buying on Time, which was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal and the Toronto Book Award. Sileika is a freelance broadcaster and journalist, and the Artistic Director at the Humber School for Writers.