Laughing All the Way to the Mosque

Janie Chang draws upon family history for her novels. She grew up listening to stories about ancestors who encountered dragons, ghosts, and  immortals, and about life in a small Chinese town in the years before the Second World War.

She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University. She is also the founder and main organizer of Canadian Authors for Indies, a national day of support by authors for independent bookstores.

Born in Taiwan, Janie has lived in the Philippines, Iran, Thailand, and New Zealand.  She now lives in beautiful Vancouver, Canada.

Her first novel, Three Souls, was a finalist for the 2014 BC Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and one of nine Canadian books long-listed for the 2015 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, Dragon Springs Road, was published in early 2017.

ZARQA NAWAZ created Little Mosque on the Prairie. Premiering on the CBC in 2007, it ran for six seasons, was watched in over sixty countries and landed Nawaz in the public eye. When not writing, producing or directing for the show, she has spent much of the past six years writing comedy pilots for ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX, and touring the world as a sought-after public speaker. She has been interviewed or profiled by CNN, the BBC, The New York Times and Al Jazeera. A contributor to CBC’s DNTO, Zarqa Nawaz lives in Regina with her loving but long-suffering family.