Prolific U.S. author Joyce Carol Oates will be among the high-profile authors attending this year’s Blue Metropolis literary festival in Montreal. Oates will be in town to accept the Blue Met Literary Grand Prix, a $10,000 prize that recognizes “a lifetime of literary achievement by an internationally acclaimed writer.”

Winner of the National Book Award for her novel them, Oates is the author of more than 50 novels as well as a staggering number of short stories, poems, essays, and memoirs. In the late 1960s and ’70s, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Ontario, where along with her husband, Raymond Smith, she founded a small press and literary magazine, The Ontario Review. Oates writes about the experience in one of her most recent books, the memoir A Widow’s Story.

Also attending this year’s festival, which runs April 18 to 23, is Egyptian writer and journalist Ahdaf Soueif, author of the novel The Map of Love. A prominent female writer in the Arab world, Soueif is the winner of the 2012 Blue Met Al Majidi Ibn Dhaher Arab Prize.

The festival lineup also includes Canadians Esi Edugyan, Kim Thúy, Kathleen Winter, Tamara Faith Berger, and Nicole Lundrigan.