Susan Ouriou is an award-winning fiction writer and literary translator from French and Spanish with over sixty translations and co-translations of fiction, non-fiction, children’s and young-adult literature to her credit. She has won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation and been short-listed for that same award on five other occasions. A number of her translations have also been placed on IBBY’s (International Board on Books for Youth) Honour List. She has also written two novels, Nathan and Damselfish, the latter of which was short-listed for two awards, as well as numerous short stories. Susan lives in Calgary, Alberta.
In 2012 Pierre Cattan founded Small Bang, a creative studio based in Paris (France) which develops hybrid interactive projects. The products range from film productions (interactive or otherwise), to print and digital work, as well as sound production, application and game designing. He notably produced Phallaina, a free scrolling graphic novel (France Télévisions, 2016), available in french and english, that received a Peabody Award in 2016. His current project, based on French SF writer Alain Damasio’s best seller The Horde of Counterwind, is an attempt to transcend the boundaries of animation and graphic novel toward a new reading format.
Barroux lives in Paris, France, and has studied photography, art, sculpture, and architecture. He is well known for his own children’s books, as well as for the many books he has illustrated (more than 100!), including Sometimes a Wall and Free. Barroux believes that the world needs fewer borders and more birds, fewer politicians and more poets.
Barroux’s Festival appearance is generously supported by the French Embassy.
Born in Douala, Cameroon, in 1973, Léonora Miano is one of the most important voices in francophone literature. Novelist, playwright, and essayist, she is the author of nearly twenty books in which she explores singular and universal experiences of sub-Saharan or Afro-descendant peoples. She received the prix Fémina and the Grand prix du roman métis in 2013 for her novel Season of the Shadow, which was published to great acclaim by Seagull Books in 2018. Miano conceptualized and curates the Quilombola series of books at Seagull, and is also the founder and director of Quilombo Publishing based in Lomé, Togo.
Léonora Miano’s Festival appearance is generously supported by the French Embassy.
Céline Huyghebaert is an artist and a writer. Her work, at the intersection of visual arts, language and literature, has been exhibited in France and Canada. In 2019, she won the Governor General’s Literary Award for French-language Fiction for her first novel, Le drap blanc, published by Le Quartanier, which was published in English in 2022 as Remnants, translated by Aleshia Jensen. Born in France in 1978, she has been living in Montréal since 2002.
Scholastique Mukasonga was born in Rwanda. Her work has been widely acclaimed by critics, including; La femme aux pieds nus, which won the Prix Seligmann 2008, L’Iguifou, Prix Renaissance de la nouvelle 2011 and Prix Paul Bourdarie 2011; Notre-Dame du Nil, which won the Prix Renaudot 2012 and was adapted to film in 2020; and Ce que murmurent les collines, which won the Grand Prix SGDL de la nouvelle 2015. She received the Bernheim Prize from the Foundation of French Judaism in 2015 for her body of work.
Scholastique Mukasonga’s Festival appearance is generously supported by the French Embassy in Canada.
Maylis de Kerangal is the author of several novels in French; Je marche sous un ciel de traîne, La vie voyageuse, Corniche Kennedy, and Naissance d’un pont, which was translated as Birth of a Bridge, winner of the Franz Hessel Prize and the Médicis Prize. She has also published a novella, Tangente vers l’est which won the 2012 Landerneau Prize. In 2014 her fifth novel, Réparer les vivants, was published to wide acclaim, winning the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and the Student Choice Novel of the Year from France Culture and Télérama. She lives in Paris, France.
Maylis de Kerangal’s Festival appearance is generously supported by the French Embassy in Canada.
Laurent Binet was born in Paris, France, in 1972. He is the author of La Vie professionnelle de Laurent B., a memoir of his experience teaching in secondary schools in Paris. In March 2010, his debut novel, HHhH, won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman. Laurent Binet is a professor at the University of Paris III, where he lectures on French literature.
Laurent Binet’s Festival appearance is generously supported by the French Embassy in Canada.
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, born in 1981, is one of France’s most exciting and ambitious young writers. He is the author of Pornographia, Le sel, and Une éducation libertine, which won the Goncourt First Novel Prize. Animalia, his fourth novel, is his first to appear in English.