Canada

Looking for a biographer in Canada means finding someone who can shape a life lived across provinces, languages and generations. The work covers family histories, memoirs and personal archives, written for readers who want the whole of a life rather than a summary of it.

Life Story Writer and Paul Fenn work in a country where family history often crosses a border: a grandparent from Scotland, a parent from Ukraine, a childhood split between two provinces. A biographer here interviews in English and French, and sometimes in a third language the subject remembers only in fragments. The United States, the United Kingdom and Australia share the language but not the geography. A Canadian life story has to hold prairie, shield and coast in one narrative, and the writer has to know which of those the reader will recognise without explanation.