Steve Noyes has published six books of poetry and fiction, in voices as various as Omar Khayyam, basketball star Allen Iverson, a Chaucer professor, and a 9th century Chinese bureaucrat’s. Al Purdy said after reading his first book, “Noyes is a damn good poet.” In Ghost Country, Steve also explored the distances to China; in Morbidity and Ornament, he mixed his formal, tight poems in Chinese with his manic narrative English poems about the prairies, anxiety dreams, Islamic themes, and animals. It is Just That Your House is So Far Away is his first novel. Raised in Winnipeg, and a graduate of UBC’s MFA Writing program and Carleton’s journalism school, Noyes has published more than 100 poems, stories and book reviews. His writing appears regularly in such magazines and newspapers as The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, Event, The Globe and Mail, Queen’s Quarterly, and the Vancouver Sun. He has won writing grants from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council. He has also worked as Foreign Expert, policy analyst, parking-lot attendant, printing press grunt, disabilities advocate, sessional lecturer, correspondence writer, plywood mill labourer, and editor. Over the past decade, Noyes has worked and studied in Beijing, Shanghai, Taibei, Qingdao, and a little town north of Beijing. He has travelled extensively across China. He studied Mandarin at Fudan University in Shanghai, and holds an International Mandarin Proficiency Certificate. He is married to the poet Catherine Greenwood, and currently makes his home in Victoria, where he is puzzling out another novel and working for the BC Ministry of Health.