The winners of the 2010 Great Canadian Literary Hunt are now all online for your reading pleasure, and we wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to the hard-working judges who read through the entries to select this year’s winners. (Just a reminder that we’ve got a handy megalink to all the winning entries at http://2th.is/10HuntWinners.) Our thanks to these talented writers, artists, and poets: we couldn’t do it without you.

UPDATE: The one person who was — mortifyingly — left off this list of people deserving thanks is Stuart Ross, our fiction and poetry editor, who reads every single entry that comes in, helps recruit judges, and supports the contest throughout its almost year-long production process. The only explanation I have for why he wasn’t thanked in this note originally (and that’s still no excuse) is that he’s so instrumental to the contest that we tend to take his guidance and assistance for granted. For that, Stuart, I apologize. Thank you.

We would also like to thank contest coordinator Natalie Samson, who made the whole contest run smoothly this year. Our thanks, finally, to the volunteers who helped make the contest happen: Chantal Arseneault, Claudia Calabro, Luke Champion, Brianne Diangelo, Stef Duerr, Katie Findlay, Claire Haist, Heather Hogan, Kelli Korducki, Allen Kwan, Cory Lavender, Robyn Letson, Jesse Mintz, Vanessa Parks, Anne Thériault, Chris Sorenson, Melissa Wilson, and Ashley Winnington-Ball. Thank you!

Here are your judges for the 2010 contest:

Short Fiction

Gary Barwin is a writer and musician in Hamilton, Ontario. He is the author of a number of books of poetry and fiction, most recently The Porcupinity of the Stars. His website is garybarwin.com.

Jenn Farrell is a Vancouver-based writer and editor, and two-time winner of the Vancouver Courier fiction contest. she is the author most recently of the short story collection The Devil You Know.

Nicole Markotic teaches creative writing at the University of Windsor, and is the author of the novel Yellow Pages and the poetry collections Connect the Dots and Minotaurs and Other Alphabets. Her chapbook more excess won the bpnichol Poetry chapbook award.

Poetry

Alice Burdick is a Nova Scotian poet. Her second major poetry collection is Flutter, which focuses on the small things and important moments of semi-rural life.

Dani Couture was born in Toronto and raised on a number of Canadian Forces bases. She is the author of two books of poetry and is currently working on her first novel, Black Bear on Water.

Jim W. Smith is the author of half a dozen books of poetry and chapbooks. He founded the poetry magazine The Front, and its spinoff, Front Press, published the work of many of Canada’s most important poets. He now works as a lawyer in Toronto, where he continues to write.

Graphic Narrative

Jeff Lemire was born and raised on a farm in Southern Ontario, which inspired his “Essex County” trilogy of graphic novels. He is the author of The Nobody and Sweet Tooth, and in 2008 won the Joe Schuster award for Best Canadian Cartoonist and the Doug Wright award for emerging talent. See his work at jefflemire.com.

Evan Munday is a comics illustrator in Toronto. He is the author of Quarter-Life Crisis, about a post-apocalyptic toronto in which only the 25-year-olds have survived. His website is idontlikemundays.com

Jillian Tamaki is a Canadian illustrator living in Brooklyn, New York. She has published three books of art and comics, including Indoor Voice, published by Drawn and Quarterly. Visit her at jilliantamaki.com.