AuthorsIn order of appearance...  M.G. Vassanji, is the two time winner of the prestigious Giller Prize and recipient of the Order of Canada. Vassanji is of Indian heritage, grew up in Tanzania and had a very active career in nuclear physics before his literary success. He is the author of six novels and two collections of short stories. His work has appeared in various countries and several languages. A Quill and Quire review of A Place Within: Rediscovering India, his recent non-fiction for which he won the 2009 Governor General's Literary Award, describes his work “as an intensely personal meditation on history and identity” and asks us “how often does a reader have the chance to glimpse a writer’s mind at work?" Only at STORYFEST.  Nino Ricci has received much critical acclaim for his work. His trilogy, a dark epic of the immigrant experience, follows a 30 year span in the life of Vittori Innocente. The first book, Lives of Saints, spent 75 weeks on The Globe and Mail’s bestseller list and was the winner of the F.G. Bressani Prize, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. The citation for the GG award for his most recent book, The Origin of Species, reads “set mostly in Montreal, with an illuminating voyage to the Galapagos at its centre, this exquisite novel is both tough and tender, and, in the end confirms our belief in the resilience of the human heart”. We look forward to meeting this Canadian past president of PEN, a writer’s human rights organization that works for freedom of expression.  Claire Holden Rothman has worked as a lawyer, a teacher, a newspaper columnist and a translator in her native Montreal. Her new historical novel, The Heart Specialist, was inspired by the career of Doctor Maude Abbott, one of McGill’s first female students whose 1936 publication was the foundation for the study of congenital heart disease. Lawrence Hill describes this book, long listed for the 2009 Giller Prize as “a beautiful, moving, utterly captivating novel”.  Wayne Johnston was born and raised in Goulds, Newfoundland. He worked as a reporter for the St. John’s Daily News before deciding to devote himself full-time to writing. His first book, The Story of Bobby O’Malley, published when we was just 27 years old, won the WH Smith/Books in Canada First Novel award for the best first novel published in the English language in Canada that year. Subsequent books consistently received critical praise and increasing public attention. Both The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Navigator of New York spend extended periods of time on bestseller lists in Canada. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams was identified by The Globe and Mail as one of the 100 most important Canadian books ever produced. Since 2004, Wayne has held a Distinguished Chair in Creative Writing at Hollins University in Virginia - one of the top ranked schools in the US for graduate studies in creative writing. He commutes back and forth to Toronto where he has lived for almost 20 years.  Margaret Trudeau was born in Vancouver, Canada, where she attended Simon Fraser University. The former wife of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, she is also the author of two previous memoirs, Beyond Reason (1979) and Consequences (1982). Margaret now works with WaterCan, a registered charity dedicated to providing clean drinking water to the world’s poorest people, and speaks across the country on mental health issues. She lives in Montreal. Photo: Monic Richard Click from Authors back to StoryFest page. |