Sean Michaels

Sean Michaels (CAN/UK) was born in Stirling, Scotland. Raised in Ottawa, he eventually settled in Montreal, where he founded Said the Gramophone, one of the earliest music blogs. Since then, he has spent time in Edinburgh and Kraków, written for the Guardian and McSweeney’s, toured with rock bands and received two National Magazine Awards. At Wordfest, Michaels presents Us Conductors, for which the author was named Random House Canada’s New Face of Fiction for 2014. The novel was inspired by the life of the Russian scientist, inventor and spy Lev Termen, and is presented in a finely woven series of flashbacks and correspondences, taking the reader from the glamorous New York in the 1930s to the gulags and scientific camps of the Soviet Union.