Gurjinder Basran
Everything Was Good-bye centers around Meena, a young Indo Canadian woman growing up in the lower mainland of British Columbia and traces her life as she struggles to assert her independence in a Punjabi community. Raised by her tradition bound widowed mother, Meena knows the freedoms of her Canadian peers can never be hers, but unlike her sisters, she is reluctant to submit to a life that is defined by a suitable marriage. Though a narrative moving between race and culture, it is ultimately a story of love, loss and self acceptance amidst shifting cultural ideals.

Everything Was Good-bye was the winner of the 2011 Ethel Wilson Fiction Award for most outstanding fiction by a BC Author.

Gurjinder Basran’s debut novel, Everything Was Good-bye, was the winner of the Search for the Great BC Novel Contest in 2010 and won the 2011 BC Book Prize - The Ethel Wilson Fiction Award for most outstanding fiction. As a manuscript, Everything Was Good-bye was for Amazon.com's 2008 Breakthrough Novel Award and earned her a place in The Vancouver Sun's annual speculative arts and culture article "One's to Watch." Gurjinder lives in Delta, BC with her husband and two sons.

Trevor Herriot
Trevor Herriot is a prairie naturalist and writer. During his time as the Haig-Brown Writer-in-Residence in Campbell River he has been working on a non-fiction book, a personal inquiry into questions of male spirituality, sexuality, and maturity, as they affect our bonds to community and place.

His most recent book was Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds (HarperCollins, February, 2009). It won two Saskatchewan Book Awards, and was short-listed for the Writer’s Trust Non-fiction Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Non-fiction, and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing (non-fiction). His first two books, River in a Dry Land: a Prairie Passage (McClelland & Stewart, 2000), and Jacob’s Wound: a Search for the Spirit of Wildness (M&S, 2004), received several awards and nominations. His writing has appeared in the Globe & Mail, Canadian Geographic, and several anthologies. He has written two radio documentaries for CBC Ideas and is a monthly guest on CBC Radio Saskatchewan’s Blue Sky. Trevor’s blog, “Grass Notes” (trevorherriot.blogspot.com) discusses some of the stories and issues he addresses in his books. He lives in Regina with his wife Karen and their four children.

Susan Juby
Susan was raised in Smithers, BC, Canada and lived there until she moved to Toronto at age 20. She had a brief and unsuccessful career as a fashion design student and, after she worked at a series of low paying jobs, such as server, record store employee, etc., She began a degree in English Literature at University of Toronto, which she finished at the University of British Columbia. After graduating she became an editor at a self-help/how-to book publishing company based in Vancouver. Later, she did a master’s degree in publishing.

www.susanjuby.com

Robert J. Wiersema
The author of Before I Wake (2006), The World More Full of Weeping (2009) and Bedtime Story (2010), Robert J. Wiersema is also a respected books journalist, and the event coordinator at Bolen Books in Victoria, BC.

Zsuzsi Gartner
Zsuzsi Gartner is the author of the short fiction collections Better Living Through Plastic Explosives and All the Anxious Girls on Earth, the editor of Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow, and the creative director of Vancouver Review’s Blueprint BC Fiction Series. Her stories have been widely anthologized, and broadcast on CBC and NPR’s Selected Shorts. Better Living Through Plastic Explosives was shortlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize.

Zsuzsi is a long-time contributing reviewer for The Globe & Mail, and has appeared on CBC’s Canada Reads. A former senior editor at the now-defunct Saturday Night, she has received numerous nominations and awards for her magazine journalism, and a 2007 National Magazine Award for fiction. She has been on faculty for the Banff Centre’s Literary Arts Programs and has been an adjunct faculty member for UBC’s Optional Residency MFA in Creative Writing. Zsuzsi lives in Vancouver.

www.zsuzsigartner.com

Daphne Marlatt
Daphne Marlatt has published more than twenty books across a wide range of genres, including poetry, fiction, criticism, and theory. She has also been the founder of ground-breaking journals, including Tessera and periodics, and an editor on several other journals.

She has published three innovative novels: Zocalo, Ana Historic, which received critical acclaim, and Taken. Her early poem sequence, Steveston, led to the writing of The Gull (2009) an award-winning Noh play based on the traditional Japanese drama form. Marlatt's The Given (2008), a long narrative poem, won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She was awarded the Order of Canada in 2006 for her contributions to Canadian literature.

Photo Credit: Roy Miki

Garry Thomas Morse
Garry Thomas Morse has had two books of poetry, Transversals for Orpheus (2006) and Streams (2007), one collection of fiction, Death in Vancouver (2009), and two books of poetry, After Jack (2010) and Discovery Passages (2011), finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry.

Grounded in the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Desnos, Ezra Pound, Jack Spicer, Rainer Maria Rilke and his Native oral traditions, his work has been featured in a variety of publications, including Branch Magazine, Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, CV2, dANDelion, filling Station, memewar, Poetry is Dead, subTerrain, The Vancouver Review and West Coast Line. Morse is the recipient of the 2008 City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Artist and has twice been selected as runner-up for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.

Minor Episodes, his second book of fiction, concerning surrealist and speculative genres, is forthcoming from Talonbooks in 2012.

Terry Fallis
Terry Fallis is the author of The Best Laid Plans, and The High Road, satirical novels of Canadian politics. His debut novel (TBLP) was originally self-published in 2007 and won the 2008 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. Then McClelland & Stewart published TBLP in September 2008. He also won the Gold Medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awardsin the Regional Fiction – Canada East category. In 2010, the Waterloo Region chose The Best Laid Plans as the One Book, One Community selection. In February, 2011, The Best Laid Plans was crowned the winner of CBC Canada Reads as the “essential Canadian novel of the decade.” In November 2011, CBC-Television announced that The Best Laid Plans is indevelopment as a six-part TV miniseries.

McClelland & Stewart published the sequel to The Best Laid Plans, called The High Road, in September 2010. It was a finalist for the 2011 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, in April, 2011. McClelland & Stewart will publish Terry’s third novel, Up and Down, in September 2012.