According to her website, "Charlotte Gray is one of Canada’s best-known writers, and author of eight acclaimed books of literary non-fiction. Born in Sheffield, England, and educated at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, she began her writing career in England as a magazine editor and newspaper columnist. After coming to Canada in 1979, she worked as a political commentator, book reviewer and magazine columnist before she turned to biography and popular history."

In 2008, Charlotte published Nellie McClung, a short biography of Canada’s leading women’s rights activist in the Penguin Series, Extraordinary Canadians. We talk about it here:

Glenn Gould was a world renowned classical pianist and an ‘eccentric genius’— a ‘solitary, headstrong, a hypochondriac virtuoso.’  Abandoning stage performances in 1964, he concentrated instead on mastering recordings, radio, television, and print. His sudden death at age fifty stunned the world, but his music and legacy continues. Philosopher/critic Mark Kingwell sees Gould as a philosopher of music whose contradictory, mischievous, and deliberately provocative ideas ruled his life. Instead of a single narrative, Kingwell adopts a ‘kaleidoscopic’ approach.  It took Gould twenty-one "takes" to record the opening aria in the famed 1955 Goldberg Variations, Kingwell does the same with Gould’s life. Each take offers a slightly different, sensitive interpretation of this complex man, each plays with the notes, harmonies and dissonances that characterized his time on earth.

I met this past summer with Kingwell to talk about Gould, chutney, the problem of the biographical line, perfectionism, architectural beauty, tempo, pregnancy, absence becoming presence, recording and communications technology and wonder. Please listen here to our conversation here:

Lester "Mike" Pearson was an extraordinary politician. He was also an extraordinary athlete, diplomat, leader, teacher, writer and student. And yet, despite all of this, and during his lifetime being the best known Canadian in the world, many are today unaware of the important role he played in creating modern Canada with its enviable social programs and economic safeguards. Andrew Cohen‘s biography of Pearson, part of the Penguin Extraordinary Canadians series, sets out to rectify this as it explores the various, successful lives this man led, and the contributions he made both to the building of Canada and world peace. Please listen here

From his website: "Charlie Foran was born and raised in Toronto. He holds degrees from the University of Toronto and the University College, Dublin, and has taught in China, Hong Kong, and Canada. He has published ten books, including four novels [and a biography of Mordecai Richler Mordecai: The Life & Times], and writes regularly for magazines and newspapers in Canada and elsewhere…Charlie has also made radio documentaries for the CBC program Ideas and recently co-wrote the TV documentary Mordecai Richler: The Last of the Wild Jews. A former resident of Montreal, where he was a columnist for the Montreal Gazette and reported on Quebec for Saturday Night Magazine, Charlie currently resides in Peterborough, Ontario, with his family."

We talk here about his recent ‘brief life’ of Maurice Richard – part of Penguin Canada’s Extraordinary Canadians series -  of how ‘The Rocket’ was exploited both on and off the ice, and how his proud on-ice ferocity and contrasting silent, off-ice dignity, clashed and coincided with the transformation of Quebec during the second half of the 20th century.

Vincent Lam is a Canadian born member of the expatriate Chinese community of Vietnam. He is an emergency physician in Toronto, and lectures at the University of Toronto. He has also worked in international air evacuation and expedition medicine in the Arctic and Antarctic. His first book, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize. We met recently in Ottawa, during the federal election, to talk about his most recent book, a biography of Tommy Douglas, part of Penguin Canada’s Extraordinary Canadians series.

Of many interesting observations made during our conversation: two government programs by which Canadians define themselves (old age pensions and universal health care) were introduced during periods of minority government, when the CCF/NDP held the balance of power, and Tommy Douglas’s ‘socialist’ government in Saskatchewan produced balanced or surplus budgets in every one of the seventeen years it was in power.

Listen here for more:

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Nino Ricci’s first novel, the best-selling Lives of the Saints, won international acclaim and a host of awards, including, in Canada, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and in England, the Betty Trask Award and the Winifred Holtby Prize.  It was followed by In A Glass House and Where She Has Gone, which completed the trilogy that Lives of the Saints began, Testament, co-winner of the Trillium Award, and, The Origin of Species which won Ricci his second Governor General’s Award.

Born in Leamington, Ontario, to parents from the Molise region of Italy, he completed studies at York University in Toronto, at Concordia University in Montreal, and at the University of Florence, and has taught both in Canada and abroad.  We met recently at the Blue Met Writers Festival in Montreal to talk about his most recent work: a brief biography of Pierre Trudeau for Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series.

Topics covered include the Italian Canadian attachment to Trudeau and the Liberals, immigration, gun slingers, alluring leadership qualities, fear of failure, media strategies, bilingualism’s mixed legacy, the Charter, budget deficits, the pride of being Canadian, and philosopher-kings.

Please listen here:

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