- CA QUA12507
- Person
- 2 Aug. 1963-
Russell Smith, journalist, novelist, short-story writer (b at Johannesburg, South Africa 1963). After immigrating to Canada in 1967, Russell Smith grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The son of a Dalhousie University English professor, Smith studied French literature at both the University of Poitiers (France) and the University of Paris (III), and went on to acquire a Master's degree in French from Queen's University in 1987.
Smith moved to Toronto in 1989, where he quickly established himself as a freelance journalist, reviewer, and restaurant critic. His first novel, How Insensitive (1994), was nominated for the Trillium Book Award, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Governor General's Award for fiction. In this wry examination of the urban social scene, Smith exposes the troubled and frivolous lifestyles of Toronto's hopelessly trendy. He further extends this satirical representation of the city in his 1998 novel, Noise. Here, protagonist James Willing is equally critical of popular and literary culture in Canada; as a young writer, he longs for a meaningful mode of expression that extends beyond both the artificiality of suburbia and the media-crazed posturing of his peers. Work on this novel took place, in part, during Smith's 1996 stay at Berton House, located in Dawson City, Yukon, where he held the inaugural position of Writer in Residence.