Peter Watts—author of Blindsight, Echopraxia, and the Rifters Trilogy, among other things—seems especially popular among people who don't know him. At least, he wins most of his awards overseas except for a Hugo (won thanks to fan outrage over an altercation with Homeland Security) a Jackson (won thanks to fan sympathy over nearly dying from flesh-eating disease), and a couple of dick-ass Canadian awards you've probably never heard of. Blindsight is a core text for university courses ranging from Philosophy to Neuropsychology, despite an unhealthy focus on space vampires. Watts's work is available in nineteen languages.

Derryl Murphy is hoping now that he has two adult children he might have more time to write. Life is attempting to show him otherwise. His novel Napier's Bones was a finalist for the Aurora Award, his short fiction collection Over the Darkened Landscape was shortlisted for the Sunburst, and he's written a bunch of other short fiction and non fiction that has also failed to win when nominated. His most recent story is the novelette "In Memory Of" in the Tesseracts anthology Compostela. He tweets as @derrylm, and also used to tweet his grandfather's and great-grandfather's diaries of trapping in the north as @TrapperBud.