Paul Quarrington leads a writing class at Humber College, July 25, 2001.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
- Born July 22, 1953, in Toronto, Paul Quarrington was brought up in the suburb of Don Mills and attended the University of Toronto, 1970-72.
- He first came to attention as a musician, recording what became a Canadian hit song in 1979, Baby and the Blues, with partner Martin Worthy. He began writing novels while playing bass for Joe Hall and the Continental Drift, a legendary local rock band.
- Quarrington produced three novels - The Service (1978), Home Game (1983) and The Life of Hope (1985) - before the publication of King Leary, a comic tale of a retired hockey great that captured the 1988 Stephen Leacock Award for humour.
- Whale Music, published in 1989, chronicling the adventures of a washed-up rock star modelled on Brian Wilson, proved to be Quarrington's biggest success. Called "the greatest rock 'n' roll novel ever written" by Penthouse magazine, it won a Governor-General's award and was later adapted into a film co-written by the author.
- Subsequent novels, including Civilization (1994) and The Spirit Cabinet (1997), failed to generate similar sales and Quarrington turned to writing for television and film. His credits include scripts for the series Due South and Perfectly Normal. He also wrote several scripts for the stage, including The Invention of Poetry and Dying is Easy.
- Quarrington's novel Galveston, published in the United States as The Storm Chasers, was nominated for the Giller Prize in 2004, losing to Alice Munro's Runaway. He describes most recent novel The Ravine (2008), as a "semi-autobiographical" account of a broken-down writer's confrontation with a traumatic incident from his youth.
- Quarrington's love of mainstream Canadiana - fishing and hockey - is reflected in several non-fiction works, including Fishing for Brookies, Browns and Bows: The Old Guy's Complete Guide to Catching Trout (2001).
- At the same time he has maintained an active career as a musician, recording two CDs with Porkbelly Futures, a successful touring band.
- Quarrington's career as a novelist gained a boost when King Leary, championed by fellow Toronto rocker Dave Bidini, won the CBC's Canada Reads contest last year.