Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid's Tale, went back into the bestseller charts with the election of Donald Trump, when the Handmaids became a symbol of resistance against the disempowerment of women, and with the 2017 release of the award-winning Channel 4 TV series. ‘Her sequel, The Testaments, was published in 2019. It was an instant international bestseller and won the Booker Prize.’

Atwood has won numerous awards including the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

Photo credit: Liam Sharp

I'm Matthew Hughes.

I write space opera science fiction and fantasy mostly set in my extrapolation of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth. I make no bones about being heavily influenced by Vance, whose work I first encountered as a thirteen-year-old in the early 1960s.

Booklist has called me Vance’s “heir apparent” and George R.R. Martin says I “do Jack Vance better than anyone except Jack himself.” I am very proud to have been authorized by the Vance estate to write BARBARIANS OF THE BEYOND, a companion novel to the DEMON PRINCES series.

I’m Canadian, a university drop-out from a working-poor background. I’ve sold twenty-four novels to publishers large and small in the UK, US, and Canada, as well as nearly 100 works of short fiction to professional markets.

I've won the Crime Writers of Canada's Arthur Ellis Award and the Endeavour, and have been shortlisted for the Aurora, Locus, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, Endeavour (twice), A.E. Van Vogt, Neffy, and Derringer Awards.

In 2007, I took up a secondary occupation -- that of an unpaid housesitter -- so that I can afford to keep on writing fiction yet still eat every day. These days, any snail-mail address of mine must be considered temporary; but you can send me an e-mail via the address on my web page: www.matthewhughes.org. I'm always interested to hear from people who've read my work.

I also have a Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4687520

Kelley Armstrong believes experience is the best teacher, though she’s been told this shouldn’t apply to writing her murder scenes. To craft her books, she has studied aikido, archery and fencing. She sucks at all of them. She has also crawled through very shallow cave systems and climbed half a mountain before chickening out. She is however an expert coffee drinker and a true connoisseur of chocolate-chip cookies.

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults, IN REAL LIFE, a graphic novel; INFORMATION DOESN’T WANT TO BE FREE, a book about earning a living in the Internet age, and HOMELAND, a YA sequel to LITTLE BROTHER. His next book is POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER, a picture book for young readers.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the author of the novels The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Velvet Was the Night, Mexican Gothic, and many other books. She has also edited several anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award-winning She Walks in Shadows (a.k.a. Cthulhu's Daughters).

Rio Youers is the British Fantasy and Sunburst Award–nominated author of Westlake Soul and Halcyon. His 2017 thriller, The Forgotten Girl, was a finalist for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel. He is the writer of Sleeping Beauties, a comic book series based on the bestselling novel by Stephen King and Owen King. Rio's new novel, Lola on Fire, will be published by William Morrow in February 2021.

Suzanne Church grew up in Toronto, moved to Waterloo to pursue mathematics, and never left town. Her award-winning short fiction has appeared in Cicada, Clarkesworld, several anthologies, and her 2014 collection Elements. Her favorite place to write is a lakefront cabin, but she'll settle for any coffee shop with Wi-Fi and an electrical outlet. Soul Larcenist, book one in the Dagger of Sacrados trilogy, is now available from The Ed Greenwood Group at OnderLibrum.com.

I'm a novelist, editor, short story writer. I also teach, and I freelance sometimes as an arts consultant. Most of my books have been published by Warner Books, now known as Grand Central Books. If you like knowing about awards and such, my work has received the Warner Aspect First Novel award, the Sunburst Award for Canadian literature of the fantastic, the World Fantasy Award, the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, and Honourable Mention in Cuba's Casa de las Americas Prize for literature.

Alyx Dellamonica is a Toronto writer whose first novel, the apocalyptic fantasy INDIGO SPRINGS, was released in 2009 to rave reviews. Filled with sexual tension, unrequited love, messy ethical dilemmas and an ecologically unbalanced form of magic, the book tells the story of three friends who inadvertently cause the mystical equivalent of a nuclear meltdown in a small town in Oregon. The novel won the 2009 Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic and a sequel, BLUE MAGIC, was released in 2012.

Her newest novel, THE NATURE OF A PIRATE, closes the The Hidden Sea Tales trilogy, a 2014 Lambda Award Finalist. The second book in this series, A DAUGHTER OF NO NATION, was the winner of the Prix Aurora for best SF/Fantasy novel.

Dellamonica's fiction began to appear in print in 1986, and despite repeated washings, remains in circulation in a variety of print and on-line locales. Her alternate history of Joan of Arc, "A Key to the Illuminated Heretic," was short-listed for the 2005 Sidewise Award and in 2006 she was awarded a Canada Council for the Arts' Grant for Emerging Artists for her novel THE WINTERGIRLS. She teaches writing through UTSC and the UCLA Extension Writers' Program and blogs extensively about writing, photography, mass media and, inevitably, her cats..

Her 1989 outlaw marriage to writer Kelly Robson became legal in 2003.

"Being a writer is like being Spiderman. It may not always be easy--at times, it can be terribly hard. The highs are stratospheric, while the lows... occasionally, you even want to quit. But storytelling is a form of superpower; once it gets hold of a person, it will express itself one way or another. The trick is to find a way to tell your tales, to the best of your ability, while living a full and vibrant life."

David Nickle is the award-winning author of the novels Volk: A Novel of Radiant Abomination, The 'Geisters, Rasputin's Bastards and Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism, and co-author of The Claus Effect, with Karl Schroeder. His stories are collected in Knife Fight and Other Struggles, and Monstrous Affections. He is co-editor of the anthologies Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond and New Canadian Noir. He lives in Toronto, Canada, where he works as a journalist covering municipal politics.

Born April 4, 1968, in London, England, Gemma Files is the child of two actors (Elva Mai Hoover and Gary Files), and has lived most of her life in Toronto, Canada. Previously best-known as a film critic, teacher and screenwriter, she first broke onto the horror scene when her short story "The Emperor's Old Bones" won the International Horror Guild's 1999 award for Best Short Fiction. Her current bibliography includes two collections of short work (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, both Prime Books) and two chapbooks of poetry (Bent Under Night, from Sinnersphere Productions, and Dust Radio, from Kelp Queen Press). Her first novel, A Book of Tongues: Volume One in the Hexslinger Series (CZP), was published in April 2010. The trilogy is now complete, including sequels A Rope of Thorns (2011) and A Tree of Bones (2012), and she is hard at work on her first stand-alone novel. Files is married to fellow author Stephen J. Barringer, with whom she co-wrote the story "each thing i show you is a piece of my death" for Clockwork Phoenix 2 (Norilana Books). They have one son.

Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning author and critic: her short fiction has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, while her poetry has won the Rhysling award three times. She is the author of THE HONEY MONTH, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey, and writes the OTHERWORLDLY column for the New York Times Book Review. She's the co-author, with Max Gladstone, of THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR, an epistolary time-travelling spy vs spy novella. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com, or on Twitter @tithenai.

Holly Schofield's stories have appeared in Analog, Lightspeed, and Tesseracts and many publications throughout the world. For more of her work, see hollyschofield.wordpress.com .

Like a magpie, Rhonda Parrish is constantly distracted by shiny things. She’s the editor of many anthologies and author of plenty of books, stories and poems. She lives with her husband and cats in Edmonton, Alberta, and she can often be found there playing Dungeons and Dragons, bingeing crime dramas or cheering on the Oilers.

Her website, updated regularly, is at http://www.rhondaparrish.com and her Patreon, updated even more regularly, is at https://www.patreon.com/RhondaParrish.

"Rhonda Parrish is a shapeshifter with talents to match her every incarnation- magpie tenacity for picking the shiniest submissions, nightingale notes for crafting tales, and bright, feline eyes for seeking out her photographic subjects. She balances on the knife-edge of darkness and light, a sorceress of both realms." - Sara Cleto

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Matt Moore is a horror and science fiction writer who believes good speculative fiction can both thrill and make you think.

His short fiction, columns and poems have appeared in print, electronic and audio markets including On Spec, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Eulogies III, Jamais Vu, Leading Edge, Cast Macabre, Torn Realities, and several "Year's Best" anthologies. He's a five-time Aurora Award finalist, Friends of the Merrill finalist, frequent panelist and presenter, and Co-Chair of the Ottawa Chiaroscuro Reading Series.

Raised in small-town New England, a place rich with legends and ghost stories, he lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

Find more at mattmoorewrites.com.

Siobhan Carroll specializes in British literature from 1750-1850 – the turbulent historical period called the "Romantic Century" – and in modern science fiction and fantasy. She is interested in the ways that literature has shaped our understanding of empire, community, and the natural world.

Professor Carroll's first book, An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750-1850 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), describes the complicated relationship between literature, science, and exploration during the growth of the British Empire. Natural spaces such as the atmosphere and the North Pole were once inaccessible to humans and thus also ideal settings for fantastic tales. But during the Romantic Century, inventions such as the air balloon brought these spaces within the potential reach of human empire. Some authors, like Mary Shelley, reacted against this ‘invasion' of previously imagined spaces. Others, like Charles Dickens, saw it as an opportunity to argue for the importance of literature to imperial expansion. Whatever their position, writers crafted images of "uncolonizable" spaces that reflected their attitudes towards the growth of the British Empire. The images that literature helped develop – such as the notion that the Arctic and Antarctic are identical "polar spaces" and should be grouped together by scientists and politicians – continue to shape the stories we tell in fiction and in politics.

Helen Marshall is an author, editor, and self-confessed bibliophile.

Marshall completed an Bachelor's Degree in English at the University of Guelph, followed by a Masters in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Her current research as a Doctoral Candidate in Medieval Studies investigates the scrappy fragments of medieval books that survive from the early fourteenth century when scribes were just beginning to experiment with composing in English after the Norman Conquest obliterated the native writing culture in 1066.

In 2011, Marshall published a collection of poetry, Skeleton Leaves, that "[took] the children's classic, [stripped] away the flesh, and [revealed] the dark heart of Peter Pan beating beneath." The collection was jury-selected for the Preliminary Ballot of the Bram Stoker Award for excellence in Horror, nominated for a Rhysling Award for Science Fiction Poetry and won an Aurora Award for best Canadian speculative poem. Her poetry and fiction have been published a range of magazines including Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, The Chiaroscuro, Paper Crow, Abyss & Apex, and Tor.com.

Lisa L. Hannett is a writer of strange, dark fiction. Born and raised in Canada, she now lives in Adelaide, South Australia: city of churches, bizarre murders, and pie-floaters. She has had over 60 short stories appear in venues including Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Weird Tales, Apex, the Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, and Imaginarium: Best Canadian Speculative Writing. She has won four Aurealis Awards, including Best Collection for her first book, Bluegrass Symphony, which was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Her first novel, Lament for the Afterlife, was published in 2015.

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