Don Gillmor
Author of the novels: To the River, Canada: A People’s History, Kanata, Mount Pleasant and Long Change. Don Gillmor’s most recent book To the River won the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction. He is the author of a two-volume history of Canada, Canada: A People’s History, and two other books of non-fiction, The Desire of Every Living Thing and I Swear by Apollo. He has written three novels – Kanata, Mount Pleasant and Long Change – as well as nine books for children, two of which were nominated for a Governor General’s Award. He was a senior editor at Walrus magazine, and his journalism has appeared in Walrus, The Globe and Mail, Rolling Stone, and GQ magazines. He has won eleven National Magazine Awards and a National Newspaper Award.
Nino Ricci
Nino Ricci’s first novel was the internationally acclaimed Lives of the Saints. It spent 75 weeks on the Globe and Mail‘s bestseller list and was the winner in Canada of the F.G. Bressani Prize, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and in England of the Betty Trask Award and Winifred Holtby Prize.
Published in seventeen countries, Lives of the Saints was the first volume of a trilogy that continued with In a Glass House and Where She Has Gone. The trilogy was adapted for a television miniseries starring Sophia Loren and Kris Kristofferson.
Nino’s other novels include Testament, winner of the Trillium Award, and The Origin of Species, winner of the Canadian Authors Fiction Award of Nino’s second Governor General’s Award for Fiction. His most recent novel is Sleep, which also received the Canadian Author’s Award for Fiction.
Nino has served as a writer-in-residence and taught creative writing and literature at institutions across Canada and the U.S., including at Colorado College and Princeton University. His most recent appointment was as the inaugural Alice Munro Chair in Creativity at Western University. In 2011, he was appointed a member of the Order of Canada for his contributions to literature.
Lindy Mechefske
Lindy Mechefske is the author of Out of Old Ontario Kitchens – Taste Canada Gold Award for Culinary Narratives 2019; Sir John’s Table – Taste Canada Gold Award for Culinary Narratives 2016; and A Taste of Wintergreen (2011). Her work has also appeared in a number of anthologies, literary journals, magazines, and newspapers. Lindy is the food columnist for the Kingston Whig-Standard, writes regularly for a variety of magazines and is a freelance editor. Earlier in her career, she was a scientific copy editor. Her love affair with food and history began in her grandfather’s ancient Yorkshire kitchen in England. You can find her blogging sporadically about her adventures in the kitchen. She lives in Kingston, Ontario.
