Howard White was raised in a series of camps and settlements on the BC coast and never got over it. He is still to be found stuck barnacle-like to the shore at Pender Harbour, BC. He started Raincoast Chronicles and Harbour Publishing in the early 1970s and his own books include A Hard Man to Beat, Spilsbury’s Coast, The Accidental Airline, Writing in the Rain, The Sunshine Coast and A Mysterious Humming Noise (Anvil, 2019). In 2000, he completed a ten-year project, The Encyclopedia of British Columbia. He has been awarded the Order of BC, the Canadian Historical Association’s Career Award for Regional History, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year Award and a Honorary Doctorate of Laws Degree from the University of Victoria. In 2007, White was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Barry Broadfoot was born in Winnipeg in 1926, and died in Nanaimo, British Columbia, in 2003. After editing the University of Manitoba student newspaper, Broadfoot worked at papers in Winnipeg and Edmonton, and at the Vancouver Sun, where he was a reporter, editor and troublemaker for 17 years, starting in 1955. That ended in 1972, when Broadfoot chucked his daily job, got into his old Volkswagen with an upright typewriter, and drove across the country, collecting the stories that became his first book, Ten Lost Years. His other books include The Pioneer Years, Next Year Country and The Immigrant Years. Broadfoot received the Order of Canada in 1987.