Barry Callaghan is an award-winning poet, novelist, publisher and journalist. His works include Hogg: The Poems and Drawings, The Black Queen Stories, When Things Get Worst, A Kiss is Still a Kiss, and the memoir Barrelhouse Kings. His writing has been published around the world and translated into many languages. He is considered one of the greatest men of letters that Canada has ever produced, and has won the W.O. Mitchell Award for a body of work, the CBC Fiction Prize, the foundation of the Advancement of Canadian Letters Prize for Fiction, among others. He was also an athlete in his youth, and has written frequently about sport in his fiction and journalism.