Martine Desjardins
Born in the Town of Mount Royal in Quebec, Martine Desjardins worked as an assistant editor-in-chief atELLE Québecmagazine for four years before leaving to devote herself to writing. Presently she works as a free-lance rewriter, translator and journalist forL'actualité, an award-winning French-language current affairs magazine in Canada. Her first novel,Le cercle de Clarawas published by Leméac in 1997, and was nominated for both the Prix littéraires du Québec and the Grand prix des lectrices Elle Québec in 1998. It has been published by Talonbooks in English asFairy Ring.

Fred A. Reed
International journalist and award-winning literary translator Fred A. Reed is also a respected specialist on politics and religion in the Middle East. After several years as a librarian and trade union activist at theMontreal Gazette, Reed began reporting from Islamic Iran in 1984, visiting the Islamic Republic thirty times since then. He has also reported extensively on Middle Eastern affairs forLa Presse, CBC Radio-Canada andLe Devoir. Reed is a three-time winner of the Governor General's Award for translation.

David Homel
Award-winning author and literary translator David Homel also works as a journalist, editor and screenwriter. He was born in Chicago in 1952 but left at the end of the tumultuous 1960s and continued his education in Europe and Toronto before settling in Montreal in around 1980. He worked at a variety of industrial jobs before beginning to write fiction in the mid-1980s. His six novels to date have been translated into several languages and published around the world.