Robert G. Penner is a Canadian living in western Pennsylvania. His roots are in Winnipeg and southern Manitoba, but he has lived all over the world, including southern Africa, Europe, East Asia, and, more recently, the United States, where he acquired a PhD in history from Duke University and occasionally teaches. He has published short stories in numerous speculative and literary fiction journals and is the founder and editor of Big Echo: Critical Science Fiction. Strange Labour is his first published novel. Robert lives in Indiana, Pennsylvania.