A Cree author born in Nunavut, Tomson Highway is a Canadian creative polymath. The proud son of a legendary caribou hunter and champion dog sled racer and a bead-work and quilting artist, Highway is a novelist, playwright, pianist and composer, and student of languages. Along the way, Highway has carved out an international career.

Canadian author Esi Edugyan has shot to international literary fame in the past eight years. It began with Half Blood Blues, a novel about a group of jazz musicians in Paris during World War II. But her promise was first noticed when her debut book, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, was shortlisted for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award in 2005.

Elizabeth Hay is a Canadian novelist and short story writer of tremendous powers of understanding and sympathizing with real people and human situations. Her books are full of empathy and wry humour which has made her one of Canada’s beloved literary icons.

Her first novel, A Student of Weather, was a finalist for the Giller Prize, which she won in 2007 for her novel Late Nights on Air. She has twice been a finalist for the Governor-General’s Award. She was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and won another of the Writer’s Trust prizes – the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for non-fiction in 2018 for her latest book All Things Consoled.

A repeat visitor to the Readers’ Festival, Elizabeth Hay is a favourite.

Peter Robinson is a national treasure in two nations – Canada and the U.K. He is the prolific and award-winning author of the literary Inspector Banks crime novels, which are set in Yorkshire. The books, which now number twenty-five, are gripping police procedurals that have been produced for ITV in the UK by Left Bank Pictures. Five series were produced and shown on PBS in North America. They are currently available on Hulu.

Linda Spalding was born and raised in Kansas before immigrating to Canada in 1982 from Hawaii. She is the author of The Purchase, which won the Governor-General’s Literary Award in 2012. She has written three earlier novels and two works of non-fiction: The Follow, which was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Awards and the Pearson Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize; and more recently the wonderful and chilling Who Named the Knife. She is a recipient of the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contribution to the Canadian literary Community. She lives in Toronto, where she is an editor of Brick magazine.