Brad C. Anderson | Belinda Betker | Erna Buffie | Dave Duncan | Leslie Gadallah | Sampson J. Goodfellow | Matthew Hughes | Katherine Lawrence | Anne Lazurko | John Brady McDonald | Lynda Monahan | Mark Morton | Martine Noël-Maw | Lloyd Ratzlaff | Karin Melberg Schwier | Arthur Slade | Gayle M. Smith | Edward Willett | Nir Yaniv
Brad C. Anderson
Brad C. Anderson, author of Duatero, lives with his wife and puppy in Vancouver, Canada. He teaches undergraduate business courses at a local university and researches organizational wisdom in blithe defiance of the fact most people do not think you can put those two words in the same sentence without irony. Previously, he worked in the biotech sector, where he made drugs for a living (legally!).
His stories have appeared in a variety of publications. His short story “Naïve Gods” was longlisted for a 2017 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. It was published in the anthology Lazarus Risen, which was itself nominated for an Aurora Award.
Belinda Betker
Photos by Heather Brenneman (left) and Debra Marshall (right)
Belinda Betker (aka Dyke Van Dick), author of Phases, is a prairie-born poet living in Saskatoon with her Australian wife and their rescue dog, a springer-spaniel/terrier cross. Her first poetry collection, Phases, was a finalist for two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Her poetry and award-winning haiku are also published online and in various anthologies, literary journals, and chapbooks.
Belinda is a founding member of two long-running Saskatoon writing groups, Sisters’ Ink and The Obsessors. She is also a founding member of the Saskatoon Writers Collective.
Website: www.belindabetker.com
Erna Buffie
Short stories by Erna Buffie, author of Let Us Be True, have appeared in Room, Prairie Fire, Pottersfield Portfolio, and The Vagrant Review of New Fiction. Let Us Be True, her first novel, originally published by Coteau Books in 2015, was nominated for the Margaret Laurence Fiction Prize.
Erna is also an awarding-winning documentary filmmaker who has worked for CBC’s The Nature of Things and a variety of other national and international broadcasters. Her film Smarty Plants won “Best Direction” at the Canadian Screen Awards and aired on PBS’s Nature under the title What Plants Talk About.
Dave Duncan
Born and raised in Scotland, Dave Duncan, author of The Traitor’s Son and Corridor to Nightmare, moved to Calgary, Alberta, after graduating from university to take up his thirty-year career as a geologist. As the oil boom faltered in the 1980s, he sold his first novel and switched careers to become one of the most prolific and popular Canadian authors of science fiction and fantasy, with more than sixty-five traditionally published novels. Early in his career, he was producing books so fast his publisher could not keep up, so he wrote a fantasy trilogy under the name Ken Hood for a different house and a historical novel about the fall of Troy as Sarah B. Franklin.
Duncan won the Aurora Award for Best Novel in 1990 and again in 2007, and was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame for lifetime achievement in 2015. Duncan had just finished Corridor to Nightmare and was awaiting final edits on The Traitor’s Son when he died, on October 29, 2019.
Robert Runtés memorial speech outlining Dave Duncan’s contribution to Canadian SF can be watched here.
Leslie Gadallah
Leslie Gadallah, author of the Empire of Kaz series (Cat’s Gambit, Cat’s Pawn, and Cat’s Game) and The Legend of Sarah, grew up in Alberta and is currently living in Lethbridge with her geriatric black cat, Spook. Educated as a chemist, she has worked in analytical, agricultural, biological, and clinical chemistry. She has written popular science for newspapers and radio, has served as a technical editor, and is the author of four SF novels and a number of short stories.
Sampson J. Goodfellow
Sampson J. Goodfellow was an engineer, inventor and First World War veteran. Born in Scotland in 1892, he immigrated to Canada in 1902. He grew up in Toronto, where he apprenticed as a machinist. He worked briefly in Regina, Saskatchewan (where he was a member of the Regina Rugby Club, forerunners to today’s Saskatchewan Roughriders Football Club of the Canadian Football League), before returning to Toronto to attend Toronto Technical School. He enlisted in the Canadian Army and served as truck driver in France before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps, becoming a navigator on a Handley Page bomber. Shot down over German territory, he finished the war in a POW camp. During the war he became engaged to Anne Owen (Nancy) Ridgway; they were married on January 2, 1919, and returned to Regina, where Sam worked in machine engineering, eventually becoming president of Western Machine and Engineering. He and his wife were great patrons of the arts in their adopted city. Late in life, in honour of his work as an inventor, businessman, and philanthropist, Sam received an honourary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Regina. Nancy died in 1974; Sam died in 1979.
Matthew Hughes
Photo by Liza Groen Trombi, Locus Publications.
Matt (Matthew) Hughes, author of The Emir’s Falcon, writes fantasy, space opera, and crime fiction. He has sold twenty-four novels to publishers large and small in the UK, US, and Canada, as well as nearly 100 works of short fiction to professional markets.
His latest novels are: A God in Chains (Dying Earth fantasy) from Edge Publishing and What the Wind Brings (magical realism/historical novel) from Pulp Literature Press.
He has won the Endeavour and Arthur Ellis Awards, and has been shortlisted for the Aurora, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, Endeavour (twice), A.E. Van Vogt, Neffy, and Derringer Awards. He has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association’s Hall of Fame.
Website: matthewhughes.org
Katherine Lawrence
Saskatoon writer Katherine Lawrence, author of Stay, has published four poetry collections, most recently Black Umbrella (Turnstone Press, 2022). Her poetry has been published across the country and has twice been long-listed for the CBC Literary Awards.
Originally from Hamilton, Katherine has lived on the prairies for over 35 years. She is a former writer-in-residence with Saskatoon Public Library and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Saskatchewan.
Website: www.katherinelawrence.net
Anne Lazurko
Anne Lazurko is the author of Dollybird, which received the WILLA Literary Award for Historical Fiction and was shortlisted for the Saskatchewan Book Awards Fiction Award. Her second novel, What is Written on the Tongue, was released in the spring of 2022 by ECW Press, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Glengarry Book Award. A graduate of the Humber Creative Writing Program, she has had short fiction and poetry published in literary magazines and anthologies and is active in the prairie writing community as mentor, editor, and teacher. She writes from her farm near Weyburn, Saskatchewan.
Website: annelazurko.com
John Brady McDonald
John Brady McDonald, the author of The Glass Lodge, is a Nehiyawak-Metis writer, artist, historian, musician, playwright, actor and activist born and raised in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. He is from the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation and the Mistawasis Nehiyawak. The great-great-great grandson of Chief Mistawasis of the Plains Cree, as well as the grandson of famed Metis leader Jim Brady, John’s writings and artwork have been displayed in various publications, private and permanent collections and galleries around the world, including the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. John is one of the founding members of the P.A. Lowbrow art movement, and served as Vice President of the Indigenous Peoples Artists Collective for nearly a decade. John also served a term as vice-chair of the Board of Directors for Spark Theatre, and as a Senator with the Indigenous Council Committee of CUPE Saskatchewan.
John is the author of several books, and has had his written works published and presented around the globe.
John has studied at England’s prestigious University of Cambridge, where in July 2000 he made international headlines by symbolically “discovering” and “claiming” England for the First Peoples of the Americas. John is also an acclaimed public speaker, who has presented in venues across the globe, such as the Anskohk Aboriginal Literature Festival, the Black Hills Seminars on Reclaiming Youth, The Appalachian Mountain Seminars, the Edmonton and Fort McMurray Literary Festival, the Eden Mills Writers Festival and at the Ottawa International Writers Festival. John was honoured with the opportunity to speak in Australia in April of 2001. John was also included in the Aboriginal Artists and Performers Inventory for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, BC.
John’s artwork and writing have been nominated for several awards, including the 2022 Saskatchewan Book of the Year Awards, the 2022 High Plains Book Awards and the 2023 Lambda Literary Awards. John was awarded the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal (Saskatchewan). He has been honoured with several grants from the Saskatchewan Arts Board.
Website: www.artbyjohnmcdonald.weebly.com/
Lynda Monahan
Lynda Monahan, author of The Door at the End of Everything, is also the author of four other collections of poetry, A Slow Dance in the Flames (Coteau Books, 1998), What My Body Knows (Coteau Books, 2003), Verge (Guernica Editions, 2015), and a cowritten collection, A Beautiful Stone: poems and ululations (Radiant Press 2019). She facilitates a number of creative writing workshops and has been writer-in-residence at St. Peter’s College facilitated retreat, Balfour Collegiate in Regina, and the Prince Albert Public Library, and writer-on-the-wards at Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert. She is editor of several books, including Second Chances: stories of brain injury survivors, Skating in the Exit Light, a poetry anthology, and With Just One Reach of Hands, an anthology of the writing of the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Writing For Your Life group, which she also facilitates. She has served on the council for the League of Canadian Poets, the Sage Hill Writing Experience, and the Saskatchewan Writers Guild. She recently completed a year as lead artist for an Artists in Communities project through the Sask Arts Board, mentoring local artists to develop long-term community arts programming.
Mark Morton
Mark Morton, author of The Headmasters, is also the author of four works of nonfiction: Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities (nominated for a Julia Child Award); The End: Closing Words for a Millennium (winner of the Alexander Isbister Award for nonfiction); The Lover’s Tongue: A Merry Romp Through the Language of Love and Sex (republished in the UK as Dirty Words), and Cooking with Shakespeare. He’s also the author of more than 50 columns for Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture (University of California Press) and has written and broadcast more than a hundred columns about language and culture for CBC Radio. Mark has a PhD in sixteenth-century literature from the University of Toronto and has taught at several universities in France and Canada. He currently works at the University of Waterloo. He and his wife, Melanie Cameron, (also an author) have four children, three dogs, one rabbit, and no time. The Headmasters is his first YA novel.
Website: markmorton.ca
Martine Noël-Maw
Born and raised in Québec, Martine Noël-Maw, the author of The Ghosts of Spiritwood, has called Saskatchewan home since 1993. She is a French literature graduate from the Université de Montréal and has authored fifteen books and a number of plays, for both adults and youth. Her work has earned her many honours, including two Saskatchewan Book Awards and a SATAward. She was longlisted for the Prix de la nouvelle Radio-Canada (French CBC Short Story Prize) and shortlisted for the Prix du récit Radio-Canada (French CBC Nonfiction Prize). Martine is also an editor, publisher and translator.
Lloyd Ratzlaff
The most recent book by Lloyd Ratzlaff, the author of The Crow Who Tampered With Time and Backwater Mystic Blues, is a third collection of literary nonfiction, Bindy’s Moon. His essays are also featured in several anthologies, including Sons and Mothers: Stories From Mennonite Men, Reading the River: A Traveller’s Companion to the North Saskatchewan River, and apart: a year of pandemic poetry and prose. A former minister, counsellor, and lecturer at the University of Saskatchewan, he has taught writing classes for READ Saskatoon, the Western Development Museum, and the University of Saskatchewan Certificate of Art and Design. He was a columnist for Prairie Messenger Catholic Journal through its last nineteen years of publication. He lives in Saskatoon.
Karin Melberg Schwier
Karin Melberg Schwier, author of Small Reckonings, writes for and is the editor of Saskatoon HOME magazine; she is also a writer for Prairies North. She has written and co-authored six non-fiction and two illustrated children’s books exploring the lives of people with disabilities. In 2013, Karin received a YWCA Women of Distinction Award (Arts, Culture and Heritage).
Small Reckonings, her debut novel, was originally published by Burton House Books in 2020 and sold out of two printings. It was released in a revised edition in 2021 before coming to the Shadowpaw Press fold. It won the John V. Hicks Award (2019), a Saskatchewan Book Award (2021), and the Glengarry Book Award Jury Short List Recognition of Literary Excellence. She was thrilled to receive the John V. Hicks Award for Fiction in 2022, this time for the sequel, Inheriting Violet. Karin lives in Saskatoon.
Website: karinschwier.wordpress.com
Arthur Slade
Photo by Brenda Baker
Arthur Slade, author of the Canadian Chills series, was raised in the Cypress Hills of southwest Saskatchewan (on a ranch). He wasn’t raised by wolves. It was elves. And one grumpy dwarf. He began writing at an early age. It took a few years but he is now the author of more than thirty novels, including Dust (which won the Governor General’s award), Dragon Assassin, and The Hunchback Assignments. He currently lives in the mythical city of Saskatoon and does all of his writing on a treadmill desk while he listens to heavy metal. Really. It’s true.
Website: arthurslade.com
Facebook: @arthursladefan
Twitter: @arthurslade
Gayle M. Smith
Gayle M. Smith, author of Thickwood, grew up in Alberta. She distinctly remembers her family life on a mixed subsistence farm in central Alberta where, as a young child, she developed a love for animals, especially horses, and a love for reading and writing illustrated stories.
In 1989, Gayle married a Saskatchewan farmer and settled into rural life to raise three children, numerous crops, purebred and commercial cattle, and horses. Gayle and her husband used the local PFRA (Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration) Federal pasture program for their commercial cattle. They also used their horses to gather and trail their cattle to various home pastures.
Gayle was accepted into the 2011 Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild Mentorship program, where she drafted her first novel. Gayle has also been a member of a writer’s group for over ten years. In 2015, Gayle graduated from the University of Saskatchewan with a Master of Fine Arts in Writing.
Yearly wilderness pack trips in Northern Saskatchewan with her horses inspire her writing. She also rides in the mountains, competes in numerous equestrian events, and owns and operates a horse boarding facility. Gayle’s love of the environment, history, and adventure shines in her writing. She daily interacts with her beloved partner, her family, her horses, and her rural home, while contemplating and exploring through her writing the struggle and dilemma of being human.
Gayle is honoured to be included in the “stable” of Shadowpaw Press.
Blog: gaylesmith.wordpress.com
Facebook: @GayleMSmith
Instagram: @gallopayle
Edward Willett
Edward Willett, author of Paths to the Stars and Star Song, and publisher and editor of Shadowpaw Press, is the award-winning author of more than sixty books of science fiction, fantasy, and non-fiction for readers of all ages, including the Worldshapers series and the Masks of Agyrima trilogy (as E.C. Blake) for DAW Books and the YA fantasy series The Shards of Excalibur, originally published by Coteau Books. His humorous space opera The Tangled Stars comes out from DAW in 2022.
Ed won Canada’s Aurora Award for Best Long-Form Work in English in 2009 for Marseguro (DAW) and for Best Fan Related Work in 2019 for The Worldshapers podcast, and a Saskatchewan Book Award for Spirit Singer in 2002. He has been short-listed for Aurora and Saskatchewan Book Awards multiple times and long-listed for the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.
He lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, with his wife, Margaret Anne Hodges, P.Eng., a past president of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Saskatchewan. They have a college-age daughter and a much younger black Siberian cat, Shadowpaw, after whom Shadowpaw Press is named.
Website: edwardwillett.com
Twitter: @ewillett
Instagram: @edwardwillettauthor
Facebook: @edward.willett
YouTube: @edwardwillett
Nir Yaniv
Nir Yaniv, author of The Good Soldier, is an Israeli-born multidisciplinary artist living in Los Angeles. He’s an author, a musician, an illustrator, and a filmmaker. He founded Israel’s first online science fiction magazine and served as its chief editor for ten years, after which he moved on to editing a printed genre magazine. He collaborated with World Fantasy Award-winning author Lavie Tidhar on two novels, including the “deranged sci-fi extravaganza” (per The Jewish Quarterly) The Tel Aviv Dossier, and his English- language collection The Love Machine & Other Contraptions was published by Infinity Plus in 2012. His most recent Hebrew novel, King of Jerusalem, was published in Israel in 2019. His short stories have appeared in Weird Tales, Apex, and ChiZine, among others.
Nir’s musical career includes soundtracks for film, dance shows, and theater. His most recent work is the voice-and-drums animated album The Voice Remains (LifeArt Music, 2021). Nir has also directed several short films and music videos, both live-action and animated.
Website: niryaniv.com
Twitter: @TheNirYaniv
Instagram: @nyfiction
Shapers of Worlds
Tanya Huff, Seanan McGuire, David Weber, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., John C. Wright, D.J. Butler, Christopher Ruocchio, Shelley Adina, Edward Willett, John Scalzi, David Brin, Julie Czerneda, Joe Haldeman, Gareth L. Powell, Dr. Charles E. Gannon, Fonda Lee, Derek Kunsken, Thoraiya Dyer.
Read more about these authors.
Shapers of Worlds Volume II
Kelley Armstrong, Marie Brennan, Garth Nix, Candas Jane Dorsey, Jeremy Szal, Edward Willett, Bryan Thomas Schmidt, Lisa Foiles, Susan Forest, Matthew Hughes, Heli Kennedy, Helen Dale, Adria Laycraft, Edward Savio, Lisa Kessler, Ira Nayman, James Alan Gardner, Tim Pratt, Jeffrey A. Carver, David D. Levine, Carrie Vaughn, Nancy Kress, Barbara Hambly, S.M. Stirling.
Read more about these authors.
Shapers of Worlds Volume III
Griffin Barber, Gerald Brandt, Christian Cameron, Sebastien de Castell, Kristi Charish, David Ebenbach, Mark Everglade, Frank J. Fleming, Joseph Hurtgen, Violette Malan, Anna Mocikat, James Morrow, Jess E. Owen, Cat Rambo, K.M. Rice, Edward Willett, Jane Yolen, Cory Doctorow, K. Eason, Walter Jon Williams, F. Paul Wilson.
Read more about these authors.
Shapers of Worlds Volume IV
David Boop, Michaelbrent Collings, Roy M. Griffis, Sarah A. Hoyt, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Noah Lemelson, Mark Leslie, Edward M. Lerner, David Liss, Gail Z. Martin, Joshua Palmatier, Richard Paolinelli, Jean-Louis Trudel, James van Pelt, Garon Whited, Edward Willett, James Kennedy, R.S. Mellette, Lavie Tidhar.
