Merrily Weisbord is a Canadian literary non-fiction writer, documentary screenwriter and broadcaster. Her 2010 book The Love Queen of Malabar, a memoir of her longtime friendship with the late Indian writer Kamala Das, was a finalist for the 2010 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the QWF Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction, and the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. [1] Her other books include Dogs with Jobs, The Valour and the Horror (coauthored with Merilyn Simonds), Our Future Selves: Love, Life, Sex and Aging and The Strangest Dream.
Weisbord lives in Montreal and the Laurentian mountains. She was a CBC Radio broadcaster before writing The Strangest Dream: Canadian Communists, the Spy Trials and the Cold War. She co-authored The Valour and the Horror: The Untold Story of Canadians in the Second World War, which was six weeks on Maclean's best-seller list. She also authored Our Future Selves: Love, Life, Sex and Aging, published in Canada, the US, French Canada, and Japan. She co-created the hit TV series Dogs with Jobs , which sold in 57 countries worldwide, and she wrote the documentary Deconstructing Supper, finalist for the Writers Guild of Canada Top Ten Awards. She wrote and co-directed Ted Allan: Minstrel Boy of the Twentieth Century, winner of the Chris Award for social documentary.
Weisbord is a founding member of the Quebec Writers Federation, served on the National Council of the Writers' Union of Canada and the CBC Short Story Competition jury, Canada Council Non-Fiction and Public Reading juries, and the Hilary Weston Non-Fiction jury. She is currently coordinator of the QWF Workshop Committee.
As a teacher, Weisbord was distinguished visiting professor at the Honors Center at SUNY Plattsburgh, has taught creative writing and documentary film at McGill University and Concordia University and was Concordia's first literary non-fiction writer-in-residence. She is based in Montreal, Quebec. [1]
David Alton Manicom is a Canadian diplomat, civil servant, poet and novelist.
Wayne Grady is a Canadian writer, editor, and translator. He is the author of fourteen books of nonfiction, the translator of more than a dozen novels from the French, and the editor of many literary anthologies of fiction and nonfiction. He currently teaches creative writing in the MFA program at the University of British Columbia.
Merilyn Simonds is a Canadian writer.
Elyse Gasco is a Canadian fiction writer. She is a recipient of the Journey Prize, QSPELL Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and the QSPELL/FEWQ First Book Award,
Marie-Louise Gay is a Canadian children's writer and illustrator. She has received numerous awards for her written and illustrated works in both French and English, including the 2005 Vicky Metcalf Award, multiple Governor General's Awards, and multiple Janet Savage Blachford Prizes, among others.
Neil Smith is a Canadian writer and translator from Montreal, Quebec. His novel Boo, published in 2015, won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. Boo was also nominated for a Sunburst Award and the Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book Award, and was longlisted for the Prix des libraires du Québec.
The Valour and the Horror is a Canadian television documentary miniseries, which aired on CBC Television in 1992. The series investigated three significant Canadian battles from the Second World War and was a co-production between the CBC, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and Galafilm Inc. The films were also broadcast by Radio-Canada, the French network of the CBC. The series was written by Brian McKenna, an award-winning journalist and founding producer of The Fifth Estate and his brother, Terence McKenna, and was directed by Brian McKenna.
The Quebec Writers' Federation Awards are a series of Canadian literary awards, presented annually by the Quebec Writers' Federation to the best works of literature in English by writers from Quebec. They were known from 1988 to 1998 as the QSPELL Awards.
Sean Michaels is a Scottish-born novelist, music critic, and blogger. Based in Montreal, Quebec, he has written about music for publications such as The Guardian, McSweeney's, The Believer, Pitchfork, Maisonneuve, The Observer, The Wire and The National Post. His weekly music column, Heartbeats, debuted in The Globe & Mail in 2015.
Katia Grubisic is a Canadian writer, editor and translator.
Saleema Nawaz is a Canadian author whose works of short fiction have been published in literary journals such as Prairie Fire, PRISM International, Grain, The Dalhousie Review, and The New Quarterly. Nawaz was born in Ottawa, Ontario and later moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba in order to study English at the University of Manitoba, where she received her M.A. with a creative writing thesis. Her first complete collection of short fiction, entitled Mother Superior, was published by Freehand Books in 2008. Nawaz completed her first novel, Bone and Bread, published by Anansi Press in 2013, while residing in Montreal, Quebec.
Nalapat Balamani Amma was an Indian poet who wrote in Malayalam. Amma (Mother), Muthassi (Grandmother), and Mazhuvinte Katha are some of her well-known works. She was a recipient of many awards and honours, including the Padma Bhushan, Saraswati Samman, Sahitya Akademi Award, and Ezhuthachan Award. She was the mother of writer Kamala Surayya.
Julie Barlow is a Canadian journalist, author and conference speaker who writes and publishes both in English and French and is based in Montreal, Quebec.
Kate Sterns is a Canadian writer.
Monique Polak is a writer from Montreal, Quebec. She has won the Janet Savage Blachford Prize, formally known as the Quebec Writer's Foundation Prize for Children's and Young Adult Literature, three times: What World is Left (2009), Hate Mail (2014), and Room for One More (2020).
Susan Gillis is a Canadian poet and editor.
Dogs with Jobs is a Canadian documentary television series about working dogs and show dogs. Each half-hour episode consists of two to three segments on individual dogs from around the world. The family-friendly series has featured service dogs, search and rescue dogs, police dogs, herding dogs, and others. Segments show footage of dogs on the job, and also include stories of their rescue, training, and relationships with their owners and handlers.
Christopher Gudgeon is an Canadian author, poet and screenwriter. He has contributed to numerous magazines – including Playboy, MAD and National Lampoon – and written almost 20 books, from critically acclaimed fiction and poetry like Song of Kosovo¸ Encyclopedia of Lies, Assdeep in Wonder and Greetings from the Vodka Sea, to celebrated biographies of Stan Rogers and Milton Acorn, to popular history on subjects as varied as sex, fishing and lotteries. He is also executive director of It Gets Better Canada, a not-for-profit organization promoting positive messages of hope for LGBTQ+ youth.
Jocelyn Parr is a Canadian writer, whose debut novel Uncertain Weights and Measures was a shortlisted finalist for the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction at the 2017 Governor General's Awards. It was also shortlisted for the 2018 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, longlisted for the 2019 International Dublin Literary Award, and won the QWF's 2017 Concordia University First Book Prize. Uncertain Weights and Measures began as a Masters thesis in the Creative Writing Program at Concordia University. Set in post-revolutionary Moscow, the novel traces the life of a young research scientist working at a brain institute that housed Lenin's brain, and that of the man she loves, Sasha, whose artistic ambitions run afoul of the state-sanctioned aesthetics. A writer for The Walrus suggests the book could "very well be read as a cautionary allegory of our 'brave and visionary time.'" James Gifford, writing for Canadian Literature, writes that the "sustained tension between plot and thought is the novel's greatest success. The reader is pressed to ask challenging questions of history, science, and private life without ever shifting out of the gripping narrative. Uncertain Weights and Measures is clearly a novel of ideas, but it never reads like a treatise or thought experiment, though in a sense it is. Parr was nominated for the Governor General's Award, and her first book declares the opening of an exciting career."
Robyn Maynard is a Black Canadian writer. She is most noted for her 2017 book Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present, an examination of anti-Black Canadian racism that explores the enduring legacy of slavery in the ways that Black people experience surveillance and captivity through policing, jails, prisons, child welfare, and border controls. The book was designated as one of the “best 100 books of 2017” by the Hill Times, listed in The Walrus‘s “best books of 2018”, shortlisted for an Atlantic Book Award, the Concordia University First Book Prize and the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction. It is the winner of the 2017 Annual Errol Morris Book Prize. Its French translation won the Prix des Libraires du Québec (2019) in the essay category.