Ken Babstock Airstream Land Yacht (Anansi)		KEN BABSTOCK was born in Newfoundland and grew up in the Ottawa Valley. His poems won gold at the 1997 National Magazine Awards. He has also won the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Prize and the Atlantic Poetry Prize. Babstock lives in Toronto.
Joseph Boyden Three Day Road (Penguin)		A Canadian of Irish, Scottish, and Metis roots, Joseph Boyden is the author of Born with a Tooth, a collection of stories that was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Writer’s Craft Award. His work has appeared in publications such as Potpourri, Cimarron Review, Blue Penny Quarterly, Black Warrior, and The Panhandler, among others. He divides his time between northern Ontario and Louisiana, where he teaches writing at the University of New Orleans.
Lynn Coady Mean Boy (Doubleday)		LYNN COADY was nominated for the 1998 Governor General's Award for Fiction for her first novel, Strange Heaven. She received the Canadian Authors’ Association/Air Canada Award for the best writer under thirty, and the Dartmouth Book and Writing Award for fiction. Her second book, Play the Monster Blind, was a national bestseller and a Best Book of 2000 for The Globe and Mail; Saints of Big Harbour, also a bestseller, was a Globe and Mail Best Book in 2003.  Lynn Coady lives in Edmonton.
Dede Crane Sympathy (Raincoast Books)		Dede Crane's fiction has been shortlisted for the CBC Literary Award and published in numerous literary journals. She is a former professional ballet dancer who has studied Buddhist psychology at Naropa Institute in Colorado and psychokinetics at the Body-Mind Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts. She lives in Victoria, B.C.
Bill Gaston Sointula (Raincoast Books)		Bill Gaston (Victoria, B.C.) is the author of several works of fiction, including the Giller Prize-nominated story collection Mount Appetite. He grew up in Winnipeg, Toronto, and North Vancouver. Before teaching at various universities, he worked as a logger, salmon fishing guide (then, having had his fill of depleting the planet's resources), group home worker and, most exotically, playing hockey in the south of France. He has published five novels — Tall Lives, The Cameraman, Bella Combe Journal, The Good Body, and most recently, Sointula, — four collections of short fiction and a collection of poetry. His plays include Yardsale, Ethnic Cleansing, and I AM DANIELLE STEEL. His short fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories, been broadcast nationally on the CBC, and in 1999 won a Canadian Literary Award for Fiction. In 2003 he was awarded the inaugural Timothy Findley Award.
Brad Kessler Birds in Fall (Scribner)		Brad Kessler’s previous books include Lick Creek and The Woodcutter’s Christmas. His essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, and the Kenyon Review, among others. He is the author of several award-winning children’s books, and the recipient of a Lange-Taylor Prize from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. He has taught at the New School University and in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. He lives with his wife, the photographer Dona Ann McAdams, in Vermont.
Stephen Kimber Reparations (HarperCollins)		Stephen Kimber, MacLean Hunter Professor of Journalism at King’s College in Halifax and former producer for CBC and CTV, is the author of four non-fiction books, including the bestselling Flight 111: The Tragedy of the Swissair Crash. He has won an ACTRA award for documentary writing and a National Author’s Award. He and his wife and three children live in Halifax.
Elaine McCluskey The Watermelon Social (Gaspereau Press)		Elaine McCluskey's stories have appeared in The Antigonish Review, The Gaspereau Review and Pottersfield Portfolio. The title story in this collection was shortlisted for the 2004 Journey Prize and is included in the 2004 Journey Prize Anthology. A former bureau chief for the Canadian Press news agency, McCluskey lives with her family in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
Ami McKay The Birth House (Knopf Canada)		Ami McKay writes fiction, radio documentaries and drama. As a freelance producer for CBC radio her work has aired on Maritime Magazine, This Morning, OutFront, and The Sunday Edition. Her documentary, Daughter of Family G, won an Excellence in Journalism Medallion at the 2003 Atlantic Journalism Awards. She has been a finalist in the Writers' Union of Canada's Short Prose Competition as well as the recipient of a grant from the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism, Culture, and Heritage. Originally from the US she now lives with her husband and two sons in an old farmhouse on the Bay of Fundy.
Lisa Moore Alligator (Anansi)		Lisa Moore's Open was a finalist for the 2002 Giller Prize and a national bestseller, and her work has also appeared in Canada's most prestigious literary magazines. Her most recent novel Alligator was shortlisted for the 2005 Giller Prize, and the Commonwealth Prize. Lisa Moore lives in St. John's with her husband and two children.
Trudy Morgan-Cole Violent Friendship of Ester Johnson (Penguin)		Trudy J. Morgan-Cole lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland. She published several works of young-adult fiction before writing The Violent Friendship of Esther Johnson, which won the H.R. (Bill) Percy Prize for Unpublished Novel in Atlantic Writing Competition in 2000. After working as a high-school teacher for many years, Trudy now teaches English and creative writing to adult learners. She is married to Jason Cole and has two children, Christopher and Emma.
Bapsi Sidhwa Water: A Novel Based on the film by Deepa Mehta (HB Fenn)		BAPSI SIDHWA is the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of four novels: An American Brat, Cracking India, The Bride and The Crow Eaters. Her work has been published in ten countries and has been translated into several languages. Among her many honours, Sidhwa has received  the Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe/Harvard, the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's  Award, the  Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Pakistan's highest national  honour in the arts, and the  LiBeraturepreis in Germany. She has also been inducted into the Zoroastrian Hall of Fame. Cracking India, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, was made into the film Earth by internationally acclaimed director Deepa Mehta. It was also listed as one of the best books in English published since 1950 by the Modern Library. Born in Karachi, Pakistan and brought up in Lahore, Pakistan, Sidhwa now lives in Houston, Texas.
Mark Strand Pulitzer Prize winner Blizzard of One (1998)		Strand, Mark, 1934–, American poet, b. Prince Edward Island, Canada. His poetry is noted for its confrontation with the surreal and irrational. His collections include Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964), Darker (1970), Selected Poems (1980), and Blizzard of One (1998; Pulitzer Prize). He has published a novel, Mr. and Mrs. Baby (1985), and has edited several distinguished poetry anthologies, including The Contemporary American Poets (1969) and Another Republic (1976). He was poet laureate of the United States (1990–91).

The 2006 Halifax International Writers' Festival is presented by