Noah Richler is particularly interested in stories and how the manner in which we narrate them affects our sense of identity but also political and social outcomes. He arrived at many of these ideas after producing and hosting documentaries from disparate parts of the world, many of them troubled places, for BBC Radio for fourteen years before returning, in 1998, to his native Canada.
Richler has worked in bars, mines, newspapers and the theatre, on a lobster boat in Nova Scotia, and as a prospector’s assistant in the Yukon. Now he is an author, journalist, cultural critic, an occasional broadcaster, and the literary curator of the Luminato Festival. He has won two gold National Magazine Awards and is the author of a couple of books. The first, This Is My Country, What’s Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada, won the 2007 British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and was nominated for a Nereus-Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction prize, was on most Canadian Best Book lists and picked as one of the Top Ten Books of the Decade, in 2010, by Macleans news magazine. His second, What We Talk About When We Talk About War, was a finalist for the Shaughnessy Cohen Award for Political Writing and the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and was short and long-listed for others.
Richler divides his time between the Digby Neck, in Nova Scotia, and Toronto. He is presently at work on a story about a retired scallop fisherman inadvertently caught up in one of the biggest drug busts in Spanish history.