A renowned speaker, and bestselling author, Dr. Gabor Maté is highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics including addiction, stress and childhood development. Dr. Maté has written several bestselling books, including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction; When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, and Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder, and co-authored Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need To Matter More Than Peers. His works have been published internationally in nearly thirty languages. His new book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture written with his son, Daniel Maté will be published in mid-September. Daniel Maté is a musical theatre lyricist and composer whose work has been honoured with the Edward Kleban Prize, a Jonathan Larson Foundation Grant and the Cole Porter Award for Music and Lyrics. He is the producer and host of the YouTube program “Lyrics To Go”. With his father Gabor, Daniel regularly co-leads the popular workshop Hello Again: A Fresh Start for Parents and Their Adult Children. He also runs a “mental chiropractic” service called Take A Walk With Daniel (walkwithdaniel.com).
Rawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war during the 1970s and 1980s. He immigrated to Canada in 1992 and now lives in Montreal. His first novel, De Niro’s Game, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for the best English-language book published anywhere in the world in a given year, and has either won or been shortlisted for seven other major awards and prizes, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award. Cockroach was the winner of the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. It was also shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Award and the Giller Prize. His third novel, Carnival, told from the perspective of a taxi driver, was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Award and won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. His work has been translated into 30 languages.
Javier Cercas was born in Spain in 1962. He is a novelist and columnist, and he has received numerous international awards. His books include Soldiers of Salamis (which has sold more than a million copies worldwide), The Anatomy of a Moment, The Tenant and The Motive, The Speed of Light and The Impostor. His latest novel, Even the Darkest Night: A Terra Alta Novel is available in mid-June 2022. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages. He lives in Spain.
Sarah Weinman is the author of The Real Lolita: A Lost Girl, an Unspeakable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece, which was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, BuzzFeed, The National Post, Literary Hub, The San Francisco Chronicle and Vulture, and won the Arthur Ellis Award for Excellence in Crime Writing. Weinman writes the twice-monthly Crime column for the New York Times Book Review, and her journalism has most recently appeared in New York, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post and AirMail. Weinman lives in New York City.
Hermione Lee is a biographer and critic whose work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and Penelope Fitzgerald. She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth and Willa Cather, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. She was awarded the Biographers’ Club Prize for Exceptional Contribution to Biography in 2018. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2003, she was made a CBE and in 2013, she was made a Dame for services to literary scholarship.
Aislinn Hunter is an award-winning novelist and poet and the author of seven highly acclaimed books including the novel The World Before Us, which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice book, a Guardian, Globe and Mail and NPR Book of the Year, and winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her work has been adapted into music, dance, art, and film forms—including a feature film, based on her novel Stay. In 2018, she served as a Canadian War Artist working with Canadian and NATO forces at CFB Suffield. She teaches creative writing part-time and lives in Vancouver.
Nathan Englander is the author of the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, an international best seller, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, and the novels The Ministry of Special Cases, Dinner at the Center of the Earth, and kaddish.com. His books have been translated into 22 languages and, among other prizes, he was chosen as one of Twenty Writers for the 21st Century by The New Yorker, is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, a Berlin Prize, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. His play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at the Public Theater in 2012, and his new play, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, commissioned by Lincoln Center Theater, was supposed to be running at The Old Globe in San Diego right now—sigh. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University and lives with his family in Toronto.
Craig Davidson is the author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize–nominated novel Cataract City and Rust and Bone, which was the inspiration for a Golden Globe–nominated feature film of the same name, and The Saturday Night Ghost Club. He also writes under the pen name Nick Cutter. Davidson lives in Toronto, Canada.