Contributors to Issue 85

Stevie Cameron is a Toronto journalist best known for her investigative work in Canadian politics, especially her books On the Take and The Last Amigo. In 1974 and 1975, she studied full-time at the Cordon Bleu in Paris, and in 1977, became the Toronto Star’s food writer.

Layne Coleman’s piece “Oasis of Hope” appeared in The Walrus and was nominated for a National Magazine Award. He has further developed that short story into a book-length work entitled This Will Change Everything. Layne is an actor/director/playwright and a former artistic director of Theatre Passe Muraille.

Julio Cortázar was accidentally born in Brussels in 1914. An influential Argentine author of novels and short stories, he nonetheless completed much of his work in Paris, where he established himself in 1951 and developed his unique Castilian style. Cortázar is best known for his novel Rayuela (Hopscotch), published in 1963. He died in Paris in 1984.

Maura Dooley has published several collections of poetry, most recently Life Under Water. Anthologies of verse and essays she has edited include The Honey Gatherers: Love Poems and How Novelists Work. She teaches at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Rawi Hage, is a novelist and a visual artist. He was born in Beirut, Lebanon and lives in Montreal, Canada where he holds citizenship, resides, and plans to stay. His most recent novel is Cockroach.

Alison Harris is a freelance photographer based in Paris. Her work has been published by HarperCollins, Rizzoli, and Random House, among others. Her photography is in the collections of numerous private collections and museums in Europe and the United States, including Musée Carnavalet, the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, and the Nelson Blitz Collection.

Jim Harrison is a novelist and poet who is often confused for an old Mexican.

Steven Heighton’s new books are Every Lost Country, a novel set in contemporary Tibet, and Patient Frame, a collection of poetry. He lives in Kingston, Ontario.

Robert Hass’s most recent book is The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems. He lives in Northern California.

Michael Helm’s new novel is Cities of Refuge. He lives in the country west of Toronto and is an editor of Brick.

Laird Hunt is the author of four novels, including, most recently, Ray of the Star. His fiction, translations and reviews have appeared in McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, The Believer, and Fence.

Pico Iyer lives in a two-room apartment in rural Japan with a recent copy of Brick and a Ping-Pong paddle. His latest book is The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

Eric Karpeles works as both painter and writer on the intersection of language and visual imagery. He has written about Elizabeth Bishop and is the author of Paintings in Proust. His translation of Proust’s Overcoat will appear in August 2010.

Laura Lush lives and works in Toronto.  She is working on her fourth collection of poems tentatively entitled A Shotflew of Petals.

Simon McBurney is a film actor, writer, and artistic director of Complicite, with whom he has created over thirty shows. He is currently working on a new opera, based on Bulgakov’s Heart of A Dog, due to open at Festival d’Avignon in June.

Anne McLean has translated Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs, and other writings by authors such as Julio Cortázar, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Javier Cercas, Evelio Rosero, and Tomás Eloy Martínez, among others.

Sean Michaels lives in Montreal. He writes about music for The Guardian and McSweeney’s, and for the blog, Said the Gramophone. He is presently working on two novels, on the subjects of melancholy and Leon Theremin, respectively.

Joseph O’Connor was born in Dublin in 1963. He is the author of a collection of short stories, Time Believers, and of the novels of Cowboys and Indians, Desperardoes, The Salesman, Inishowe, Star of the Sea, Redemption Falls, and Ghost Light.

Dennis Reid is chief curator of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Damion Searls is the author of the stories What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, and an editor and translator, most recently of Thoreau’s Journal and Rilke’s The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Vice, The Believer, and n+1.

Gísli Sigurðsson is research professor and head of the Folklore Department at the Arni Magnússon Institute in Iceland where he has worked since 1990. He also teaches in the Department of Folklore at the University of Iceland and at the University of Stavanger in Norway. His numerous publications include a complete annotated edition of the Eddaic Poems, and a book on orality and the sagas, Túlkun Íslendingasagna í ljósi munnlegrar hefðar: Tilgáta um aðferð (Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition; A Discourse on Method). In 1972, Gísli won the international Ping-Pong tournament in East Germany.

Linda Spalding edited and published Brick for eighteen years until she saw the light. She wrote Who Named the Knife and is currently finishing a novel.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s fiction has been translated into fourteen languages. His novel, The Informers, was translated into English by Anne McLean and published by Riverhead Books in 2009.He has translated works by E. M. Forster, John Dos Passos, and Victor Hugo, among others. Educated in Colombia and in Paris at the Sorbonne, he now lives in Barcelona.

Eleanor Wachtel has hosted the CBC Radio program Writers & Company since its inception in 1990. She’s published four books, most recently Random Illuminations: Conversations With Carol Shields, and Original Minds. She’s also the host of “Wachtel on the Arts” on Ideas.

Carl Wilson is the author of Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, which critics called one of the decade’s best books about music. He lives in Toronto, where he helps edit the Globe and Mail’s Focus section and runs the website Zoilus.