Martine Desjardins was born in the Town of Mount Royal in Quebec in 1957. The second child of six, she started writing short stories when she was seventeen. After receiving a bachelor's degree in Russian and Italian studies at the University of Montreal, she went on to complete a master's degree in comparative literature, exploring humor in Dostoevsky's The Devils . She worked as an assistant editor-in-chief at ELLE Quebec magazine for four years before leaving to devote herself to writing. Presently she works as a freelance writer, translator, and journalist for L'actualit#65533; , an award-winning French-language current affairs magazine in Canada. Desjardins currently lives in the Town of Mount Royal with her husband. In her free time, she paints miniature models of ruins overgrown with vegetation. A three-time winner of the Governor General's Award for translation, plus a nomination in 2009 for his translation of Thierry Hentsch's Le temps aboli , Empire of Desire , Fred A. Reed has translated works by many of Quebec's leading authors, several in collaboration with novelist David Homel, as well as by Nikos Kazantzakis and other modern Greek writers. Reed worked with documentarist Jean-Daniel Lafond on two documentary films: Salam Iran, a Persian Letter and American Fugitive . The two later collaborated on Conversations in Tehran (Talonbooks, 2006). Fred A. Reed resides in Montreal. Award-winning author and literary translator David Homel also works as a journalist, editor, and screenwriter. He was born in Chicago in 1952 but left at the end of the tumultuous 1960s and continued his education in Europe and Toronto before settling in Montreal in around 1980. He worked at a variety of industrial jobs before beginning to write fiction in the mid-1980s. His six novels to date have been translated into several languages and published around the world.