Hi there. Welcome to my website. To take a short-cut directly to information about one of my books, my academic work and credentials, examples of my commercial illustrations, my drawings, and my services, head to the menu at the top of the page now, where you will also find a career overview. Otherwise, keep reading. And visit my Blog for book excerpts, archived magazine articles, and original posts.
What I do
I am the author or co-author of about twenty works of non-fiction (and counting), and have published innumerable magazine articles. I’ve written widely on history, business, the environment, and sport. I provide editorial services to publishers and individuals. I also work as an illustrator and a graphic designer. In my spare time, I’m a landscape artist.
Credentials
My first pass through higher ed was at McMaster University, where I studied painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, and art history. I hold a PhD in history (York University, 2015), and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo. While I was a staff writer with the Financial Post in the late 1980s, I completed my Canadian Securities Course.
Awards
I won Canada’s National Business Book Award in 2003 for The Bubble and the Bear (Doubleday Canada, 2002), which dissected the tech-stock bubble through the rise and fall of Nortel. I was a finalist for the award in 2013 for Double Double (Harper Collins Canada, 2012), my assessment of the burgeoning Tim Hortons restaurant phenomenon. (In 1994 I published a biography of Tim Horton, Against the Odds, with Penguin Canada.)
In 2007, I published God’s Mercies (Doubleday Canada), which revealed the traumatic intersection of the careers of Henry Hudson and Samuel de Champlain. It was a finalist for both the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize (2007) and the Governor-General’s Literary Award (2008).
My doctoral dissertation, “Stone of Power,” was awarded a Dissertation Prize by York University. In 2016, I received the Distinguished Dissertation Award for Humanities, Social Sciences and Fine Arts from the Canadian Association of Graduate Studies. A revised version of my dissertation The Place of Stone, was published in 2017 by the University of North Carolina Press.
What I’m up to
In 2018 I published with McGill-Queen’s University Press Beardmore: The Viking Hoax that Rewrote History. In addition to my usual freelance writing, landscape art, and editorial services, I am working on a new book for McGill-Queen’s University Press, Jackson’s Wars, which explores A.Y. Jackson’s experiences as a soldier and war artist in the First World War and his co-founding of the Group of Seven.
How do you reach me?
Email me here
Am I on Twitter?
More than I should be. “at” DWHauthor
