Mavis Gallant wrote stories regularly for the New Yorker from 1951 and was one of the most distinguished writers in English. She was born in Montreal and after working as a journalist there she decided to travel and settled eventually in Paris. The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant came out in 1996. The Cost of Living, a collection of early and uncollected stories, was published by Bloomsbury in 2009. She died in 2014.

‘One of the best living short-story writers … She is one of the great chroniclers of exile, her fictional landscapes inhabited by misfits and lost souls, characters far from home, literally or emotionally’ – Guardian

‘One of the most gifted short-story writers of the New Yorker‘s heyday – a master of the art in an age when fiction writers and poets could make a living from the form’ – Financial Times