Karen Connelly is the author of eleven books of nonfiction, fiction and poetry, the most recent being Come Cold River, a memoir in poetry about growing up poor in Alberta. Her most recent nonfiction book, Burmese Lessons, a memoir of her time amongst dissidents, guerillas and refugees on the Thai-Burma border, was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and the BC National Award for Canadian nonfiction. The Lizard Cage, her first novel, was compared in the New York Times Book Review to the works of Solzhnitsyn, Mandela and Orwell. It was nominated for the Kiriyama Prize and won Britain’s Orange Broadband Prize for New Writers. Connelly has lived for extended periods of time in different parts of Asia and Europe and now has two homes, one in Toronto and one in Greece.