Susan Crean’s controversial first book, Who’s Afraid of Canadian Culture? was a critique of Canada’s arts institutions for failing to support Canadian art, theatre, music, film, and publishing. A freelance journalist and columnist — notably for This Magazine, Canadian Art, and The Vancouver Sun — she has written six books which have variously taken her into the heart of the Quebec independence movement in the 1970s and 1980s, into First Nations communities on the Northwest Coast in an examination Emily Carr‘s legacy, and into the struggles of the postwar labour movement in her biography of pioneering feminist labour leader Grace Hartman. She was appointed the first Maclean-Hunter chair in Creative Non-Fiction by the University of British Columbia, is a former chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada, and a founding co-chair of the Creators’ Rights Alliance / Alliance pour les droits des créateurs. The Laughing One — a Journey to Emily Carr was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Literature in 2001 and won B.C.’s Hubert Evans Prize for non-fiction. Her current projects centre on the city of Toronto. Her blog What is Toronto? was recently rated one of the world’s best city blogs by The Guardian.

You can read more from and about Susan at: susancrean.ca.