Russell Banks, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Common Wealth Award for Literature. He lives in upstate New York and Miami, Florida.

Hal Wake has been engaged with the literary community in Canada for almost 40 years. In the mid-1980s he was the book producer for CBC Radio's Morningside with Peter Gzowski. He has hosted or moderated hundreds of literary events at Festivals in Vancouver, Victoria, New York, Melbourne and Sydney Australia. He has interviewed Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie among many others. He is an honorary member of the Writers Union of Canada, on the board of the Writers' Trust of Canada and was Artistic Director of the Vancouver Writers Festival for 12 years.