Rory MacLean is the author of ten books including the UK top tens Stalin’s Nose and Under the Dragon. On his research journeys, he walked through the newly-opened Berlin Wall, met Aung San Suu Kyi in Rangoon while she was under house arrest and interviewed Pashtun elders at the Kacha Garhi refugee camp after the destruction of the World Trade Center. He has written about the missing civilians of the Yugoslav Wars [1][2] for the ICRC, on divided Cyprus for the UNDP/Committee on Missing Persons, about Berlin for the Goethe Institut and on North Korea for the British Council. He has won awards from the Canada Council and the Arts Council of England as well as a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship, and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary prize. His new book Berlin: Imagine a City — ‘the most extraordinary work of history I’ve ever read’ according to the Washington Post and one of the paper’s top tens of 2014 – is published by Hachette Canada.

You can read more on and by Rory at rorymaclean.com, Twitter, and Facebook.

Susan Crean’s controversial first book, Who’s Afraid of Canadian Culture? was a critique of Canada’s arts institutions for failing to support Canadian art, theatre, music, film, and publishing. A freelance journalist and columnist — notably for This Magazine, Canadian Art, and The Vancouver Sun — she has written six books which have variously taken her into the heart of the Quebec independence movement in the 1970s and 1980s, into First Nations communities on the Northwest Coast in an examination Emily Carr‘s legacy, and into the struggles of the postwar labour movement in her biography of pioneering feminist labour leader Grace Hartman. She was appointed the first Maclean-Hunter chair in Creative Non-Fiction by the University of British Columbia, is a former chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada, and a founding co-chair of the Creators’ Rights Alliance / Alliance pour les droits des créateurs. The Laughing One — a Journey to Emily Carr was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Literature in 2001 and won B.C.’s Hubert Evans Prize for non-fiction. Her current projects centre on the city of Toronto. Her blog What is Toronto? was recently rated one of the world’s best city blogs by The Guardian.

You can read more from and about Susan at: susancrean.ca.