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Honours Award

Canada Reads

Moose Jaw Weather

Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada
Festival 2004    July 22 - 25

Roy MacSkimming

Roy MacSkimming's latest book draws on a professional lifetime in and around the publishing industry. Described in The Globe & Mail as "a brilliantly seductive cultural history of Canada," The Perilous Trade: Publishing Canada's Writers is a wide-ranging, personal account of the dramatic struggles and exploits of book publishers in English Canada from 1950 to the present. 

MacSkimming's earlier works include two novels with European settings: Formentera (set in the Balearic Islands) and Out of Love (set in Athens and Crete). He has also written an unauthorized biography of hockey legend Gordie Howe and a reassessment of the 1972 Canada-Soviet series, described as "a hockey and historical masterpiece" by author Roy MacGregor. 

Born in Ottawa and educated at the University of Toronto, MacSkimming broke into publishing in 1964 and co-founded New Press in 1969. He has been books editor and columnist at The Toronto Star, an official with the Canada Council for the Arts, and policy director of the Association of Canadian Publishers.  He is at work on a third novel, set in 19th-century Canada.