Elaine Kalman Naves was born in Budapest, Hungary, and immigrated to Canada in 1959 as a child. She attended McGill and Bishop's Universities, and worked as an editor and researcher at the Centre d'Etude de Québec during the 1970s. She now writes a book column and literary features for the Montreal Gazette and also freelances widely (recent credits include a radio dramatization of her book, Journey to Vaja, for CBC's Ideas, and author interviews published in Contemporary Literary Criticism). Naves is the author of a work of narrative non-fiction entitled Journey to Vaja: Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family; a collection of biographical sketches of prominent Montreal authors, past and present, The Writers of Montreal; and the editor of two scholarly works in Canadian history. Her next book will be about Montreal writers whose roots are in other countries.