Ken McGoogan, Calgary AB

2002

Born in Montreal, raised in Québec. Now lives in Calgary with his wife and two grown children.

Ken McGoogan has worked as a journalist for more than two decades at three major Canadian dailies: The Toronto Star, The Montreal Star and the Calgary Herald. As Books Editor and Literary Columnist at the Herald, Ken reviewed and profiled countless well-known writers, some of whom became friends. In 1999, during the epochal strike at the Herald, authors Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson posed with Ken after joining him on the picket line.

During recent years, Ken McGoogan has taught regularly in the Freelance Writing program at Mount Royal College. Courses include Stylistics, Business Practices for Writers, Feature Writing, Advanced Creative Writing, Creative Non-Fiction and The Art of the Review.

Writing fiction involves donning masks. Ken McGoogan has written three novels. The most recent, Chasing Safiya, is a round-the-world quest-novel with a supernatural aspect; Calypso Warrior is a political fiction that opens with the fire-bombing of a Montreal bookstore; and The Kerouac Suite rings three changes on Sixties-style apocalypse: Visions of Kerouac, Kerouac's Ghost and Le Fantome de Kerouac.

While writing Fatal Passage, Ken McGoogan traveled north with two friends to mark the spot, as shown above, where nineteenth-century explorer John Rae discovered the final link in the Northwest Passage. A Canadian bestseller, Fatal Passage won the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize.

Ken’s first book, which won the Wilfred Eggleston Award as best work of non-fiction by an Alberta author, is called CANADA'S UNDECLARED WAR: Fighting Words from the Literary Trenches. Drawing on Ken's long experience as a literary journalist, the book explores the politics of Canadian culture.

Purchase Ken McGoogan Books Online at Amazon.ca (click the book)

Selecte Works

• Fatal Passage, HarperCollins, Canada, 2001
• Chasing Safiya, Bayeux Arts, Calgary,1999
• Kerouac’s Ghost, Robert Davies Publishing, 1996
• Calypso Warrior, Robert Davies Publishing, 1995
• Canada’s Undeclared War, Detselig Enterprises, Calgary, 1991