Contributors to Issue 81

Margaret Avison was born in Galt, Ontario in 1918. A prolific poet who began publishing in the 1940s, she also worked as a librarian, editor, and social worker. She died in 2007.

In 1990, Deborah Baker moved to Calcutta where she studied Bengali and wrote In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding. Since then, her essays have appeared in a range of publications from The New York Times to the Calcutta Statesmen. With her husband, writer Amitav Ghosh, and her two children, she now divides her time between Calcutta, Goa, and Brooklyn.

Thomas Böhm is program director of Literaturhaus Cologne, and has published two books on reading as an art form, most recently Weltempfang (Reception of the World).

Roberto Bolaño was born in 1953. He was a celebrated Chilean writer whose Rimbaudian life in Mexico among a ragged tertulia of poet-misfits is mythologized in The Savage Detectives. Bolaño founded the infamous Infrarealism Movement. The English translation of his poems will soon be out from New Directions. He died in 2003.

Rosalind Brackenbury is an English novelist and poet and has lived for fifteen years in Key West, Florida. Her new novel, Becoming George Sand, will be published next year by Doubleday in Canada, and Artemis in Holland.

Colette was born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in 1873 in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, in the Burgundy region of France. She is perhaps best known for her Claudine series, and for her novels Cheri and Gigi. In total she published over fifty works. Colette died in Paris in 1954. Her funeral was attended by thousands.

William Corbett is a poet living in Boston’s South End. He teaches writing at MIT, is the director of a small press (Pressed Wafer), and is on the advisory board of Manhattan’s cue Art Foundation. Hanging Loose will publish his new book of poems, Opening Days, in spring 2008.

Lydia Davis has published six collections of short stories, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Break It Down (1986). Her most recent collection is Varieties of Disturbance, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2007. She is currently completing a translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, to be released by Viking Penguin.

Geoff Dyer’s most recent book, The Ongoing Moment, is a sort of history of photography. A new novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, will be published in spring 2009.

Nat Farbman was born in 1907 in Poland. He arrived in the United States at the age of four, and began working as a freelance photographer while studying electrical engineering at the University of Santa Clara. During his fifteen years as a Life staff photographer, he was considered one of its most versatile practitioners. He died in 1988.

George Fetherling has published fifty works of fiction, poetry, memoir, history, cultural studies, and travel. His most recent book is Tales of Two Cities: A Novella Plus Stories. He lives in Vancouver.

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of two novels, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Foer’s next book will be a work of non-fiction about ethical food choices, to be published in 2009.

Forrest Gander’s recent translations include Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho and (with Kent Johnson) The Night, a book-length poem by Bolivian visionary Jaime Saenz. Gander’s novel As a Friend comes out in September from New Directions.

Barry Gifford is the author of Wild at Heart, Night People, The Phantom Father, and many other books. He has also co-written screenplays for films such as Perdita Durango, Lost Highway, and City of Ghosts.

Francisco Goldman is the author of three novels, The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman, and The Divine Husband. His first work of non-fiction is The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? He lives in Brooklyn and Mexico City.

Born in Leeds, raised in Mexico City, and now based in Cambridge, Ángel Gurría-Quintana is a historian, translator, and literary journalist. His work has appeared in The Observer, The Economist, The Paris Review and Prospect. He is a regular contributor to (and occasional assistant editor at) the Financial Times’s books pages.

Jim Harrison is a novelist and poet who divides his year between the Mexican border and Montana. His new book, The English Major, will be released in fall 2008 by Grove.

Roscoe Howells was born in Saundersfoot in 1919. He is a founding member and former chairman of the Pembrokeshire Historical Society, and before that of the old Pembrokeshire Records Society. He has researched and written numerous books on his native country.

Nikita Lalwani is the author of the novel Gifted, a novel about a young math genius. She is a contributor to the forthcoming AIDS Sutra: Hidden Stories from India, from Random House. She lives in London.

Torch River is the fourth book of poetry by Elizabeth Philips. She is also the author of A Blue with Blood in it and Beyond my Keeping. She has edited numerous poetry collections and taught creative writing in Banff. She lives in Saskatoon.

Alex Pugsley is a Toronto writer and filmmaker. As a screenwriter, he has written for performers such as Dan Aykroyd, Michael Cera, Gavin Crawford, Leslie Nielsen, and Scott Thompson—but in TV series you’ve probably never heard of.

Michael Redhill is a man of marvellous humour and intelligence who should be called back who should be called back to Canada pronto because he is gaining weight at an alarming rate.

Byron Rogers is a Welsh journalist, essayist, and biographer. His work includes The Man Who Went into the West: The Life of R. S. Thomas. He has written for the Sunday Telegraph and the Guardian, and was once the speechwriter for the Prince of Wales.

Leona Theis lives in Saskatoon. Her favourite places to write are a cabin in the boreal forest and the Stegner House in southwestern Saskatchewan. Her latest book is The Art of Salvage, a novel about messing up and finding hope.

Alexandre Thiltges is a French literary critic and scholar. In the summer of 2007, he travelled across North America with photographer Jean-Luc Bertini and interviewed twenty American and Canadian writers in their homes.

David Thomson was born and raised in England, where he attended the London School of Film Technique. Since then, he has published over twenty books, most of which deal, in some form or other, with film, its pleasures and its nature. He is also a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Nation, Movieline, The New Republic, and Salon “Have You Seen . . . ?” introduces the reader to 1,000 films. Some are masterpieces and personal favourites, Some are just those movies everyone has heard of. The book will be published by Knopf in September.

Eleanor Wachtel is the host of CBC Radio’s “Writers & Company” and “Wachtel on the Arts”. Four books of her interviews have been published: Original Minds (HarperCollins Canada), Writers & Company (Knopf Canada), More Writers & Company (Knopf Canada), and Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields (Goose Lane Editions).