Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master…
Miriam Toews is a Canadian writer of Mennonite descent. She grew up in Steinbach, Manitoba and has lived in Montreal and London, before settling in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Natalia Ginzburg (née Levi) was an Italian author whose work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short storie…
American feminist Betty Naomi Friedan (née Bettye Naomi Goldstein) wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and cofounded the National Organization for Women in 1966. This book started the "second wave…
Rachel Cusk was born in Canada, and spent some of her childhood in Los Angeles, before her family returned to England, in 1974, when Cusk was 8 years old. She read English at New College, Oxford.
Martinique-born poet, playwright, and politician Aimé Fernand Césaire contributed to the development of the concept of negritude; his primarily surrealist works include The Miracle Weapons (1946) …
Meredith Bagby is the author of The New Guys: The Astronauts That Changed the Face of Space Travel. She is a partner at Big Swing Productions, a film and TV production company. Bagby's previous books …
Ali Smith is a writer, born in Inverness, Scotland, to working-class parents. She was raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at Aberdeen, and then at Cambridge,…
Whitney Chadwick is a professor emerita at San Francisco State University. She has published on issues of gender and sexuality in surrealism, modernism, and contemporary art. Her book Women, Art, and …
Edward Morgan Forster, generally published as E.M. Forster, was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class differenc…
Deborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their "intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination", including PAX, H…
Sebastian Smee (1972 - ) is an Australian-born art critic. He is a former art critic for The Washington Post and the author of several books on art history.
Claire’s first book, Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in January, 2011. It will be published simultaneously in the UK by Bloomsbury.
Lauren Elkin is a widely acclaimed Franco-American writer, critic, and translator. Her books include Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, which was a Radio 4 Book of the Week, a New York Times Notable Book …
Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. The start of his journalism career coincided with t…
Alice Wong (she/her) was a disabled activist, media maker, and consultant based in San Francisco. She was the Founder and Director of the Disability Visibility Project® (DVP), an online community dedi…
Rebecca Birrell grew up in Southport, and currently lives in Cambridge. She studied English Literature at UCL, followed by Women’s Studies at the University of Oxford. She has occupied curatorial posi…
