SCOTT GRIFFIN is Chairman and founder of The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. In addition he is Chairman, Director and majority shareholder of General Kinetics Engineering Corporation and Advance Precision Limited, which manufacture automotive parts (both companies have design and manufacturing facilities in the Toronto area) and Chairman, Director and majority shareholder of House of Anansi Press/Groundwood Books. As a Director of Canadian Executive Services Overseas (CESO), a Volunteer Advisor to CESO and a Director of African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) Canada, Griffin devotes a third of his time on this basis. In 2006, he published a memoir entitled My Heart is Africa about his two-year aviation adventure throughout that continent. He is also Chancellor of Bishop’s University, Chairman of the Governors of Sedbergh School and a Director of DGC Entertainment Ventures Corp. His interests include sailing, skiing, flying, English literature and travel to remote places. He was born in Hamilton, Ontario.

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MARGARET ATWOOD‘s books have been acclaimed internationally. In a rich and varied career she has authored more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction and her work has been published in more than forty languages. Atwood’s newest novel, The Year of the Flood (2009) is the follow-up to her 2003 Giller Prize winner, Oryx and Crake, which was also shortlisted for the coveted Booker and Orange Prizes, and was on the longlist for the IMPAC award. Other recent publications are Moral Disorder, a collection of interconnected short stories, The Door, a volume of poetry, and Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, which won the 2009 Libris Award for Best Non-Fiction Book. Additional titles include the Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada, and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Penelopiad, and The Tent. A number of these titles have also been rendered in theatrical, operatic, and television film versions. In 2004, she co-invented the Long Pen™.

Amongst others, Atwood was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters in 2008, the 2010 World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award, and the 2010 Nelly Sachs Prize for Literature. She is currently a Vice-President of International PEN.

Born in Ottawa, Atwood grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson. Together, they are the Joint Honourary Presidents of the Rare Bird Society within Birdlife International. For more information about Margaret Atwood and her works, please visit: www.margaretatwood.ca.

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CAROLYN FORCHÉ is the author of four books of poetry: Gathering The Tribes, which received the Yale Younger Poets Award, The Country Between Us, chosen as the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets, The Angel of History, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Blue Hour, published in March 2003, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has translated Flowers from the Volcano and Sorrow by Claribel Alegria, The Selected Poems of Robert Desnos (with William Kulik), and Mahmoud Darwish’s Unfortunately, It Was Paradise (with Munir Akash). She compiled and edited Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (W.W. Norton & Co., 1993). She has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and in 1998, was given the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture in Stockholm for her work on behalf of human rights and the preservation of memory and culture. In 2006, she won the Robert Creeley Award, named after the renowned poet and former Griffin Poetry Prize judge who died in March, 2005. She teaches at Skidmore College, and lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison, and their son, Sean-Christophe.

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ROBERT HASS was US Poet Laureate from 1995-97, a position he used to battle American illiteracy and promote awareness about the environment. Awarded the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship, twice the National Book Critics Circle Award (in 1984 and 1997), and the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1973, Robert Hass is a professor of English at UC Berkeley. His most recent volume of poetry, Time and Materials, was honoured with the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. He also published the Best American Poetry 2001 anthology, and his published books of poetry include Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, and Sun Under Wood, as well as a book of essays on poetry, Twentieth Century Pleasures. He’s co-translated many of the works of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, including A Treatise on Poetry, and he’s edited Selected Poems: 1954-1986 by Thomas Transtromer and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. Robert Hass’s deep commitment to environmental issues led him to found the River of Words poetry contest.

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Novelist and poet MICHAEL ONDAATJE was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, which recognizes an international fiction author’s overall achievements – an honour he shares with fellow Griffin trustee Margaret Atwood. His latest novel, Divisadero, has been awarded the 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award. His book The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, published by Vintage Canada, in which he has several conversations with the well-known editor of such films as The English Patient and The Conversation, was honoured with a 2003 American Cinema Editors Award. Other distinctions include the recognition of his novel In the Skin of a Lion as the 2002 Canada Reads winner. His novel Anil’s Ghost was winner of the Governor-General’s Award, France’s Prix Medici, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and co-winner of the Giller Prize. Anil’s Ghost followed the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, which won The Booker Prize and became an Oscar-winning film. His first novel, Coming Through Slaughter, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1976; his ever popular fictionalized family history, Running in the Family, was published in 1982. His novel In the Skin of a Lion has been translated into 10 languages, and was the first winner of Ontario’s Trillium Book Award. Ondaatje began his writing career as a poet with The Dainty Monsters (1969). He has since published nine other books of poetry, including The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, which won the Governor General’s Award in 1970. His books of poetry include The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting. His stage version of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid was performed in Canada, the US, and Britain. Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, and moved to Canada in 1962. He lives in Toronto.

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ROBIN ROBERTSON is from the north-east coast of Scotland. His fourth collection of poetry, The Wrecking Light, was published in 2010 and shortlisted for the Forward, Costa and T. S. Eliot Prizes. His translation of Medea was recently staged at the Dublin Fringe Festival and dramatised on radio by RTÉ. He has received a number of accolades, including the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and all three Forward Prizes.

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DAVID YOUNG is the author of the plays Glenn, Inexpressible Island, Clout, Love is Strange and Fire which have been widely produced in Canada, the United States and Europe. In a former life, he was President of the Coach House Press for ten years. David has also published two novels and written extensively for film and television. Young recently completed a screenplay about an armored car heist and is currently adapting Alistair MacLeod’s novel No Great Mischief for the stage, to be produced next season in Toronto. In addition, he has written a six-hour mini-series about medical relief work in the middle of the civil war in south Sudan, being shot in South Africa in the winter of 2003/04.

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