Billie Livingston won the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award in 2017. Her first novel, Going Down Swinging, was published by Random House Canada in 2000. Nightwood Editions published her first collection of poetry, The Chick at the Back of the Church, the following year and it was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award. Livingston has since published three novels, including One Good Hustle, longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and nominated for the Canadian Library Association’s Young Adult Book Award; and The Crooked Heart of Mercy, published in 2016. Livingston won the CBC’s Bookie Award as well as the Danuta Gleed Literary Award in 2010 for her story collection, Greedy Little Eyes. One of her short stories (“Sitting on the Edge of Marlene”) has been adapted into a feature film and another (“You’re Taking All the Fun Out of It”) was published in This Magazine and included in The Journey Prize Stories 13. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, Livingston grew up in Toronto and Vancouver, and has since lived in Tokyo, Hamburg, Munich, Los Angeles, and London. She now lives in Vancouver.