John Ralston Saul

John Ralston Saul is an award-winning essayist and novelist. His works of ideas, history, and philosophy are constantly being reissued and translated for a broad readership and taught worldwide. A long-time champion of freedom of expression, he was the elected President of PEN International from 2009 to 2015. He is a leading voice in the international movement supporting immigrants and refugees. 

Saul has greatly impacted political and economic thought in many countries, particularly among young people confronting what they feel is a stagnant yet walled-off society. Declared a “prophet” by TIME magazine, his 14 works have been translated into 28 languages in 37 countries. Saul is perhaps best known for his philosophical trilogy – Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, and The Unconscious Civilization. A meditation followed this in the trilogy – On Equilibrium: Six Qualities of the New Humanism. 

In 2005 in The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, John Ralston Saul warned that like it or not, globalism was already collapsing. If we did not act quickly, we would be caught in a crisis and limited to desperate reactions. The Collapse of Globalism has continued to spread around the world, published most recently in Greece, Turkey, and for a third time in an updated and expanded form in Britain. 

In his 2008 bestseller, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada, Saul argues that Canada has been heavily influenced and shaped by Indigenous ideas, including an original approach to egalitarianism, a taste for social complexity, a constant balancing of individualism and groups, a penchant for negotiation over violence, and a focus on inclusion which has encouraged positive attitudes towards immigration. A Fair Country is part of an argument that began with Reflections of a Siamese Twin and was brought to a conclusion in his most recent book, The Comeback (2015). 

Saul is the Co-Founder and Co-Chair of both 6 Degrees, the Global Forum for Inclusion, and the Institute for Canadian Citizenship (ICC), a national organization promoting the inclusion of new citizens. 6 Degree is a movement that involves a growing coalition of people worldwide working to create new language, policies, and actions supporting immigration and refugees and their rapid inclusion in society through citizenship. Each year, 6 Degrees gathers thousands of people in Berlin, Calgary, Mexico City, Montreal, and Toronto to build this coalition against the forces of fear, hatred, and exclusion. 

He was elected to two three-year terms as President of PEN International (2009-2015), the only worldwide organization of writers and journalists. PEN is a leading force for freedom of expression, getting writers out of prison and working against the growing tendency to kill journalists. 

Saul is widely considered to have led PEN International into a new era of international activism, from negotiating with dictators around the world to speaking out for endangered languages. When Saul stepped down as President, Leonard Cohen thanked him in a written tribute for his “personal courage in hostile territory; for patience and skill in the face of the world’s relentless indifference to cruelty; for being all that a man can be in these times, and more.” 

He has published six novels. The Birds of Prey, his first published book, sold several million copies around the world. It was followed by The Field Trilogy, which deals with the crisis of modern power and its clash with the individual. It includes Baraka or The Lives, Fortunes and Sacred Honor of Anthony Smith, The Next Best Thing, and The Paradise Eater. His most recent work of fiction is Dark Diversions, a picaresque novel in which he observes the life of modern nouveaux riches Americans. 

He is the General Editor of the Penguin Extraordinary Canadians project, a series of 18 biographies that reinterprets important Canadian figures for a contemporary audience by pairing well-known Canadian writers with significant historical, political, and artistic figures from 1848 onwards. His biography of Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin – the leaders of the democratic movement which came to power in 1848 – is his own contribution to this series. 

He has received many national and international awards for his writing, including Chile’s Pablo Neruda Medal, South Korea’s Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, and The Gutenberg Galaxy Award for Literature. The Unconscious Civilization won Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Maclean’s magazine chose his Reflections of a Siamese Twin as one of the ten best non-fiction books of the twentieth century. His novel, The Paradise Eater, won Italy’s Premio Lettarario Internazionale.