Emma Hooper is a Canadian musician, novelist and lecturer at Bath Spa University. Her first novel, Etta and Otto and Russell and James, follows an 82-year-old woman as she begins a 3,232-km walk from Saskatchewan to Halifax to see the ocean for the first time.

Her second novel, Our Homesick Songs, is about a 10-year-old boy named Finn who clings to his hometown in Newfoundland, though residents are leaving en masse due to the collapse of the cod industry. Our Homesick Songs was on the longlist for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Her latest novel is We Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky, which examines the stories of female saints in the Roman Empire. Five girls, who are sisters but were adopted by different families, enjoy a modest childhood in their small Portuguese village until they are kidnapped by soldiers as teenagers and brought to the commander — who turns out to be someone from their past life. They soon find themselves at the centre of a deadly standoff and must part ways to fight their own battles in order to survive.