Rudy Wiebe was born in 1934 on an isolated homestead near Fairhollme, Saskatchewan. He is the author of nine novels, five short-story collections, and ten non-fiction books; his novels The Temptations of Big Bear and A Discovery of Strangers both won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. In 2007 he received the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction for his memoir Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest. Rudy Wiebe: Collected Short Stories, 1955 - 2010 was published in 2010. He has been a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta since 1992, and lives in Edmonton.