Jaume Cabré (Barcelona, 1947) is an essential author in contemporary Catalan literature. For many years he combined his literary work with teaching and writing film and television scripts. His literary work is mainly novels and short stories, but he has also had plays published, as well as several books of reflections on writing and reading. His work, with titles such as La telaranya, Fray Junoy o l'agonia dels sons, Llibre de preludis, Senyoria, Les veus del Pamano and Jo confesso, and Viatge d’hivern, a book of short stories, has been translated in over twenty countries and has been an overwhelming success in Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands, making him one of the most important authors on the current literary landscape.
Marie-Claire Blais is a major French-Canadian novelist who has contributed monumentally to Canadian literature since she published her first novel, La belle bête (1959), a classic of Québec literature, at the age of twenty. For more than three decades, especially throughout the sixties and seventies, Blais has been a remarkably fecund author, producing a novel in almost every given calendar year. Her writing is exquisitely literary and has received much scholarly attention. Her entire oeuvre has been translated into English and widely translated into other languages including German, Russian, and Chinese. Blais' awards and honours are many.
Born in Haiti but raised in Northern Quebec (Jonquière, in the Saguenay region), Stanley Péan is the author of twenty books: short story collections, novels, fiction for kids and a couple of essays about jazz. He is also a screenwriter; a journalist; the editor in chief of Le Libraire (a bimonthly magazine about books in Quebec, distributed freely in independent bookstores); a book reviewer on Vous m'en lirez tant, Radio-Canada's Première Chaîne weekly literary program; the host of a daily jazz program on Espace musique, Radio-Canada's all-music national radio network; and, finally, was the chair of l'UNEQ, the writers and authors union in Québec, from 2004 to 2010.