Leonard Cohen was born and raised in the affluent Westmount district of Montreal and graduated from McGill University in 1955. For a short time, Cohen attended graduate school at Columbia. Throughout the 1960s, Cohen's verse, both as song and poetry, became extremely popular. His "Suzanne" was one of the most-recorded songs of the decade. Always a poet whose work reflected the attitudes of society's nonconformists, Cohen successively identified with the Beat Generation of the 1950s, the rhetoricians of protest of the mid-1960s, and the more meditative disillusionment of the 1970s. Cohen's best-known work, Beautiful Losers (1966), is a dazzling novel that is an abstraction of all searches… for a lost innocence. In Death of a Lady's Man (1978), one of Cohen's collections of poetry, his preoccupation with the duality of beauty and decadence is once again explored.
Paul Quarrington was born July 22, 1953, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He grew up during his teen years in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills. He attended the University of Toronto, from 1970 to 1972. Quarrington has won the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters, most promising new writer in 1986; Periodical Distributors of Canada Authors Award; Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 1987 for King Leary; Finalist for Trillium Book Award for King Leary in 1987; Governor General's Literary Award for English Language Fiction in Canada in 1989 for Whale Music; Genie Award for best screenplay for Perfectly Normal; nominated for Gemini Award for Best Writing In A Dramatic Series - Due South… - All the Queen's Horses with Paul Gross, and John Krizanc; Short Listed For Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 1998 for The Boy On The Back Of The Turtle; Short Listed for Trillium Book Award in1998 for The Boy On The Back Of The Turtle; The Writers Guild of Canada's Annual Top Ten Award in 2000 for Manipulation an episode of the television series Power Play.