Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. Her newest novel, MaddAddam (2013), is the follow-up to The Year of the Flood (2009) and her Giller Prize winner, Oryx and Crake (2009). Other recent publications include The Door, a volume of poetry (2007), Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008), and In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011). Additional titles include the 2000 Booker Prize–winning The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Penelopiad. Atwood lives in Toronto with the writer Graeme Gibson.
Russell Banks is the prize-winning author of seventeen books of fiction, including the novels Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Two of his novels, Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, have been made into critically acclaimed, prize-winning films. He has published six collections of short stories, most recently A Permanent Member of the Family. His work is widely translated, and in 2010 he was made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Minister of Culture of France. He is the former president of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was the New York State Author, 2004–2008, and in 2014 was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame. He resides in upstate New York and Miami Beach, Florida.
Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received the Hugo, Nebula, Endeavor, Locus, Tiptree, Sturgeon, PEN/Malamud, and National Book awards and the Pushcart and Janet Heidinger Kafka prizes, among others. In recent years she received lifetime achievement awards from the World Fantasy Awards, Los Angeles Times, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, and Willamette Writers, as well as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award, the Library of Congress “Living Legend” award, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Le Guin was the recipient of the Association for Library Service to Children’s May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award and the Margaret Edwards Award. She lived in Portland, Oregon, and her website is www.ursulakleguin.com.
Marilynne Robinson is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama for “her grace and intelligence in writing.” She is the author of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Robinson’s nonfiction books include When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, The Death of Adam, and Mother Country, which was nominated for a National Book Award. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Iowa City.
Wallace Stegner wrote thirty-five books over a sixty-year career. Among the novels are The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), All The Little Live Things (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal, 1967), Angle of Repose (Pulitzer Prize, 1972), The Spectator Bird (National Book Award, 1977), and Crossing to Safety (1987.) His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954), Wolf Willow (A History, A Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier) (1962), The Sound of Mountain Water (1969), and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (1992), which earned him a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle award. In 1946 Stegner started the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, where he served on the faculty until 1971. He was twice a Guggenheim Fellow and a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Arts and Letters. He died at eighty-four, on April 13, 1993.
