TERESA TOTEN is an award-winning writer who was born in Zagreb, Croatia, but left for Canada on that same day. Although she's lived in Toronto for most of her life, Teresa has also lived in Delhi (Ontario), Montreal, Ottawa, and New York. She developed her broad taste in reading as a result of her non-English-speaking mother's habit of filling shopping bags full of books from wildly different sections of the local library. Teresa has twice been shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award, for The Game in 2001 and for Me and the Blondes in 2006.