Contributors to Issue 80

Gil Adamson lives in Toronto. Her novel The Outlander (House of Anansi Press) was launched in June of this year. She is the author of two books of poetry: Primitive (Coach House Press, 1991), and Ashland (ECW press, 2003), and a book of short stories, Help Me, Jacques Cousteau (Porcupine’s Quill, 1991).

Playwright, actor, and director Carmen Aguirre has worked extensively in theatre, film, and television in North and South America. She is currently working on a play about sex and politics called Blue Box, and on a memoir, Something Fierce, about her years in the underground resistance in Pinochet’s Chile. She lives with her son Santiago in Vancouver.

Dr. Gregory Altschuller was a member of the New York Academy of Medicine and a lecturer on the history of science. He was born in Torzhok, Russia, and immigrated to the United States in 1938. Dr. Altschuller joined the staff of the Roosevelt Hospital, Manhattan, in 1947. He died in 1983.

Charlie Austin is Cricinfo’s Sri Lanka editor. He is also the director of a U.K.-based travel company called Red Dot Tours, which specialises in tailor-made leisure and sporting holidays.

Baziju lives and writes for part of the year in the old nurses’ quarters of the Royal Adelaide Hospital, not far from the Adelaide hills, which on most days can be seen in the distance and in which the liquidambars of the title are to be found. Baziju is the pen name of Roo Borson and Kim Maltman.

Robin Benger is a South African-raised, Canadian-based filmmaker who has had some close shaves while making a hundred documentaries in sixty countries over thirty years, but all he ever really wanted to do was open the batting for the new South Africa. He believes profoundly and delusively that he’d have mastered any bowler in the world, except the divine Murali.

John Berger is a storyteller, essayist, novelist, screenwriter, dramatist, and critic. His many books include Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, and, most recently, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance.

Stéphan Bureau is the host and producer of Contact, a series of in-depth interviews with prominent figures from the artistic, literary and intellectual world. Mr. Bureau was the New York and Washington correspondent for tva and anchorman for Télévision de Radio-Canada’s national newscast.

Susan Choi is the author of three novels, The Foreign Student (1998), American Woman (2003), and the forthcoming A Person of Interest (2008). She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and sons.

Graham Greene was born in 1903 in Berkhamsted near London. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and was received into the Catholic Church in 1926. He published many novels, including Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948) , and The End of the Affair (1951). He died in Switzerland in 1991.

Jim Harrison is a novelist and poet who divides his year between the Mexican border and Montana. His most recent novel is Returning to Earth, published by Grove Press in the United States and House of Anansi Press in Canada

Robert Hass is a poet and essayist. His poetry books include Praise, Field Guide, and Sun Under Wood. His latest is Time and Materials, published by Ecco/HarperCollins.

Writer and broadcaster Ramona Koval presents The Book Show, Australia’s foremost literary program, each day on ABC Radio National.

Jonathan Luckhurst is a self-taught photographer currently residing in Canmore, Alberta. He has published in Black and White Magazine (U.S.) and Silvershotz (U.K.) He is currently working on several projects including “The Sacred Spaces” and “Portrait of a Worker.” He chooses to shoot on medium format film and print on traditional fibre-based darkroom papers.

Guy Maddin has directed numerous shorts and nine features, including most recently Brand upon the Brain! Maddin’s documentary, My Winnipeg, premiered in the fall of 2007 at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Don McKay’s latest books are Strike/Slip, for which he won the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Deactivated West 100.

Viktor Platonovich Nekrasov was a writer, journalist, editor, dissident, and émigré. Born in Kiev in 1911, he fought for the Red Army at the Battle of Stalingrad and wrote a celebrated memoir of his war experiences. After his expulsion from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1973, he immigrated to Paris, where he edited the magazine Kontinent and continued to write until his death in 1987.

Sharon Olds is working on a collection of poems that will definitely not be called The Mother.

Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel is Divisadero.

Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul. His novels, Snow, and My Name is Red, have been translated into over forty languages. His most recent books are the autobiographical Istanbul and Other Colours: Essays and a Story.

Leon Rooke lives in Toronto. His most recent books include the story collections Hitting the Charts (2006) and Painting the Dog (2001), the novels The Beautiful Wife (2005) and The Fall of Gravity (2000), the novella Balduchi’s Who’s Who (2004), and the poetry collection, Hot Poppies (2005).

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of five books of poetry and one hybrid memoir, The Book of Jon. Forthcoming are Du Soleil, de l’histoire, de la vision (translated by Béatrice Trotignon), a new book of poems, Body Clock, as well as her own translation of a book by Jacques Roubaud.

George Toles is Chair of Film Studies at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film. For more than twenty years, George has been the screenwriting collaborator of Guy Maddin, most recently on Brand Upon the Brain!, and on Guy’s documentary, My Winnipeg.

Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry has been translated into fifty languages. His most recent collection is Den stora gåtan (The Big Riddle). Robin Fulton’s English translation of Tranströmer’s entire body of work, The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems, was published in 2006.

Julie Vandervoort is a human rights lawyer and a singer/activist with the international Gaia and Earth Charter singers. She has been published in Grain, Prism, and Geist and is the author of Tell the Driver. She lives in Halifax.