Guests

Kate Heartfield is the author of several novels, including The Tapestry of Time (2024), about clairvoyant sisters in WWII; The Valkyrie (2023), a retelling of legends; and the Sunday Times bestseller The Embroidered Book (2022), about Marie Antoinette and her sister Maria Carolina. She has also written interactive fiction, and Assassin’s Creed novels. She has won the Aurora Award for Best Novel three times, and her fiction has been shortlisted for the Aurora, Nebula, World Fantasy, Crawford, Locus, Sunburst, Scribe and Ottawa Book awards. Kate is a former journalist who lives in Ottawa, Canada with a black cat named Minerva.

Premee Mohamed is a Nebula, World Fantasy, Ignyte, and Aurora award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Locus, British Fantasy, British Science Fiction, and Crawford awards. In 2024, she was the Edmonton Public Library writer-in-residence. She is the author of the ‘Beneath the Rising’ series of novels as well as several novellas. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues and she can be found on her website at www.premeemohamed.com.

Stephen Kotowych is a World Fantasy Award finalist, and winner of Canada’s Aurora Award, Spain’s Premi Ictineu, and the Writers of the Future Grand Prize. His stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and have been translated into a dozen languages. He is also the series editor and publisher of the Aurora Award-winning Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction series. Now a freelance writer and editor, Stephen previously worked for over 15 years in the Canadian publishing industry.