University of Toronto

Camilla Gibb 2 February 2007

“Camilla Gibb is surely one of the most talented writers around.… She can do funny, she can do sad, she can do sex. I suspect that there is little that this wonderful woman cannot do.” —The Times (London)

Born in London, raised in Toronto, read around the world: Camilla Gibb, says Britain’s Orange Prize Committee, is one of the twenty-one writers to watch in the twenty-first century. Her most recent novel, Sweetness in the Belly, was a Giller finalist and won the Trillium Award. Our featured work is Gibb’s second novel, The Petty Details of So-and-So’s Life (Doubleday, 2002), a Globe and Mail Best Book Selection that follows a dysfunctional family from Niagara Falls to Hell, or maybe Salt Spring Island.

Ken Babstock 23 March 2007

“Mean is one of the best things to happen to poetry in Canada in this decade.”

—Time International

Ken Babstock is probably the most acclaimed Canadian poet of his generation. Praised by poets from Dennis Lee in Canada to Simon Armitage in Britain, quoted by indie bands like The Rheostatics and The Deadly Snakes, Babstock writes what Lee calls “poetry with heart, purpose, killer images, craft to burn.” Our featured collection, his debut book Mean (Anansi, 1999), won the Atlantic Poetry Prize and the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Prize.