It happened in Vancouver, just before 'the sixties' started. A whole generation of poets, writers and artists shook off the repression of 1950s Vancouver. Piccolo Mondo blurs the lines between the fiction and fact of those days, challenging both the boundaries of narrative and the rules of biography. This hilarious collaborative novel chronicles the coming of age of a generation, a city and a new literary culture.

George Bowering, Canada’s first Poet Laureate, was born in the Okanagan Valley.After serving as an aerial photographer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, Bowering earned a BA in English and an MA in history at the University of British Columbia, where he became one of the co-founders of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. He has taught literature at the University of Calgary, the University of Western Ontario, and Simon Fraser University, and he continues to act as a Canadian literary ambassador at international conferences and readings.A distinguished novelist, poet, editor, professor, historian, and tireless supporter of fellow writers, Bowering has authored more than eighty books, including works of poetry, fiction, autobiography, biography, and youth fiction. His writing has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, and Romanian.Bowering has twice won the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s top literary prize. In 2019 he received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement for an outstanding literary career in British Columbia.

George Bowering's profile page

Angela Bowering's profile page

Inspired by the worlds of nature and literature, Matthews creates music that encourages the listener to step beyond the everyday, to dwell for a while in images of paradox, to consider the ever-changing tapestry of life.

Michael Matthews completed a Ph.D. in composition at North Texas State University in 1985. In 2012 Matthews retired from twenty-seven years of full-time teaching at the Marcel A. Desautels Faculty of Music, University of Manitoba; he is now Professor Emeritus there. Matthews is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and currently lives and works in Berlin.

Matthews is also active as a photographer, and his abstract images were recently exhibited in Germany and the US. Canadian publisher At Bay Press will shortly be releasing The Gibbous Moon, a book of photography and poetry created in collaboration with poet Dennis Cooley.

Michael Matthews' profile page