Ian Brown

I began life as a business reporter at the Financial Post and later at Maclean's Magazine; quit to freelance and start a publishing company, Invisible Books, with four other writers, which also published Not the Globe and Mail, a parody; was then hired at the (real) Globe and Mail as a feature writer, for five years; quit again to found and host Later the Same Day, a daily afternoon radio show on CBC Radio; moved to Los Angeles, where I wrote a book and fathered a daughter (the latter a more successful experiment than the former) and began to contribute to the NPR radio show This American Life; returned as host of Sunday Morning and Talking Books on CBC Radio; and eventually made my way back to the Globe, where I have now worked for just over a decade. Along the way I co-founded an online magazine, Open Letters, and was chair of the Literary Journalism program at the Banff Centre for seven summers. I have won a number of National Newspaper and National Magazine Awards; the National Business Book Award for my first book, Freewheeling, an expose of Canadian Tire and the Billes family; the Charles Taylor Prize, the BC National Award and the Trillium Prize for another book, The Boy in the Moon, which the New York Times deemed one of the ten best books of 2011; and was short-listed for the Taylor Prize and for the Hilary Weston Writer's Trust Prize for my last book, Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-First Year. I am also the author of Man Overboard, a book about manhood in the late twentieth century, and the editor of What I Meant to Say, an anthology of essays by men and about men, but for women. I live in Toronto with my wife, the film and television writer Johanna Schneller. We have two children, Hayley and Walker. I love to read, write, paint and back-country ski in the mountains. I also like to garden and cook, but am rarely effective at either.