Amanda Betts, Senior Editor
Amanda Betts is a senior editor for Knopf Canada, where she edits narrative non-fiction and upmarket and literary fiction. She’s particularly interested in memoir and a range of subjects including the natural world, psychology, history, and science. She is proud to have acquired Canadian writers Sarah Bernstein (Study for Obedience), Michelle Min Sterling (Camp Zero), Britt Wray (Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Eco-Anxiety), and Holly Hogan (Message in a Bottle: Ocean Dispatches from a Seabird Biologist), as well as international authors including Maggie O’Farrell (The Marriage Portrait), Ed Yong (An Immense World), and Michael Finkel (The Art Thief). She’s excited for the forthcoming publication of the novel The Art of Vanishing by Lynne Kutsukake and the memoir If the Sky Should Fall by Janaya Future Khan.
Lynn Henry, Editor-in-Chief, Knopf Canada; Publishing Director, Alchemy by Knopf Canada
Lynn Henry is the editor-in-chief at Knopf Canada and the publishing director of Alchemy, whereshe edits groundbreaking , award-winning and lasting literary fiction and non-fiction. Lynn works with Canadians such as Madeleine Thien, Miriam Toews, Sheila Heti, Rawi Hage, Dionne Brand, Mary Lawson, Christina Sharpe, Canisia Lubrin, Joshua Whitehead, Lisa Moore, Maria Reva, Shyam Selvadurai, and Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, alongside internationally celebrated writers such as Sally Rooney, Judith Butler, Sarah Bakewell, and Sunjeev Sahota. With Dionne Brand, she developed the concept for Alchemy Books, which launched in 2022 within Knopf Canada, and collaborates with Brand on that visionary line. In her work at Knopf Canada, as in the Alchemy partnership, Lynn continues to be inspired by original and provocative ideas, enthralling voices, transformative perspectives, and witty, smart, beautiful writing.
Martha Kanya-Forstner, Publisher
Martha Kanya-Forstner is the publisher of Knopf Canada, home to many of the world’s finest writers. Books she has edited have won the Booker Prize, the Giller Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, and the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction and non-fiction. She has worked with Margaret Atwood, David Chariandy, Michael Crummey, Elizabeth Hay, Tomson Highway, Vincent Lam, Kyo Maclear, James Maskalyk, Michael Ondaatje, Michael Redhill, Lisa Bird-Wilson, and, since 2021, when Martha joined Knopf Canada, the list has grown to include Helen Knott, Chetna Maroo, Naomi Klein, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Yann Martel, Gabor Maté, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Douglas Stuart, John Vaillant, and Andrew Westoll. She has recently acquired new work from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Phoebe Boswell, Natasha Brown, Eliana Alves Cruz, Angelica Ferrara, Kazuo Ishiguro, Harriet Rix, and Jane Rogoyska. In 2022, under Martha’s leadership, Knopf Canada launched Alchemy, publishing books that explore a radical vision for the future.
Kiara Kent, Executive Editor
Kiara Kent joined Knopf Canada as executive editor in August 2023 after twelve years at Doubleday Canada. In her previous role, she recently published Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv, Daughter by Claudia Dey, and Alicia Elliott’s And Then She Fell, and is looking forward to publishing exceptional debut novels by Myriam Lacroix (How It Works Out) and Yeji Y. Ham (The Invisible Hotel) in 2024. She has worked with Terese Marie Mailhot, Claire Cameron, Marlon James, Yaa Gyasi, Anna Metcalfe, Scaachi Koul, Nathan Hill, and Raven Leilani. Since joining Knopf Canada, her list has grown to include Morgan Talty, Elif Shafak, Jo Harkin, and Kiran Desai, and she has joined the international Hogarth Shakespeare team. In her new role, Kiara is looking for propulsive, daring literary fiction that prizes depth of feeling and dynamic storytelling, as well as voice-driven, perspective- shifting narrative non-fiction.
Hilary Lo, Assistant Editor
Hilary Lo is an assistant editor at Knopf Canada and Alchemy, where she lends support across the fiction and non-fiction lists. She has had the pleasure of assisting on books by Chetna Maroo (Western Lane), Christina Sharpe (Ordinary Notes), and Y-Dang Troeung (Landbridge), among others. She assumed the lead editorial role on Everything and Nothing At All by Jenny Heijun Wills, and is the Canadian editor of Rayne Fisher-Quann’s highly anticipated essay collection, Complex Female Character. Hilary recently acquired world rights to Joanne Leow’s Exhumations, an incendiary exposé of Singapore and its history of oil refinement. She hopes to continue building out her list with boundary-pushing narratives, with a particular focus on queer, decolonial and diasporic perspectives, though she is attracted to beautiful writing more than anything else. Upcoming publications Hilary is looking forward to are Lynne Kutsukake’s transporting novel The Art of Vanishing and Alchemy’s first work-in- translation, Solitaria, by Brazilian author Eliana Alves Cruz.
Emma Lockhart, Production Editor
Emma Lockhart is the Production Editor at Knopf Canada, where she works closely with Susan Burns and Rick Meier to shepherd our books through the editorial and production processes. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and a Master of Arts in Religious Studies, both from Queen’s University, and has taken courses in publishing through The Chang School.
Rick Meier, Publishing Manager
Before joining Knopf Canada as publishing manager, Rick Meier was an assistant editor at the Knopf Random Canada Publishing Group, working with many of the imprint’s distinguished and bestseller authors, including Gabor Mate, Naomi Klein, Miriam Toews, Salman Rushdie, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Dionne Brand. As publishing manager, Rick works closely with the editorial team and across departments, especially with Knopf Canada’s paperback imprint, Vintage Canada, where he focuses on Knopf Canada’s prestigious roster of catalogue authors and titles. As an acquiring editor, he is interested in upmarket non-fiction (he recently edited Dr. Chris van Tulleken’s internationally bestselling exposé on the processed food industry, Ultra-Processed People) and adventurous, upmarket literary fiction (he recently acquired the next two volumes in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s monumental Morning Star series, and is looking forward to the publication of Kevin Barry’s noir-Western, The Heart in Winter, which he acquired and edited for Canada.
Dionne Brand, Editorial Director, Alchemy by Knopf Canada
Dionne Brand is a poet, novelist, and essayist who, with her genre-bending explorations of narrative form, honours the complexities of diasporic experience, gracefully bringing to life the fundamental relationship between politics and aesthetics. The third Poet Laureate of Toronto (2009-2012), Brand was born in Trinidad and moved to Toronto in 1970. Aesthetically and politically radical, Brand’s work has made her a central figure in both world and Canadian literature, earning her many awards and honours including the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2021. In 2022, she published Nomenclature, a volume of new and collected poetry. And in 2023, her non-fiction classic, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, was published in a new edition celebrating its twenty years of influence. Brand was poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart from 2014-2021. She was invested as a member of the Order of Canada in 2017.