Swan's international bestselling novel The Wives of Bath, is both a shocking Gothic tale about a murder in a girls' boarding school and an adolescent confession. Mouse and Paulie, reluctant fourteen-year-old boarders at Bath Ladies College, are confronted by the slippery quest for one small, vital thing: the thing that definitively makes boys different from girls. The novel was made into the feature film Lost and Delirious, shown in 34 countries. Since the film's debut, young women all over the world have role-played the parts of Mouse, Tory and Paulie on the Lost and Delirious website.

Few foreign journalists have travelled to more villages or remote districts than John Stackhouse. For eight years, he was based in New Dehli as The Globe and Mail's development issues reporter but spent much of his time living with poor farmers, fisherman, lepers and slum-dwellers, travelling by third-class rail through India or by boat through Borneo. He has won five National Newspaper Awards - one for his eye-opening account of life for the homeless on Toronto streets - A National Magazine Award and an Amnesty International prize for foreign reporting.