Doug Saunders

For other people named Douglas Saunders, see Douglas Saunders (disambiguation).

Doug Saunders (born 1967) is a well-known British-Canadian journalist and author, a columnist and reporter for the Globe and Mail, a Canadian national newspaper based in Toronto, Canada. He is the newspaper's European Bureau Chief, based in London, England, and author of the paper's international-affairs column.

His journalism has won the National Newspaper Award, Canada's counterpart to the U.S. Pulitzer Prize, on four occasions. He won the prize a record three consecutive times, in 1998, 1999 and 2000, for critical writing. And in 2006, he won a fourth award, honouring him as the best columnist in Canada. In 2008, he was shortlisted for the award in international reporting, for a series of investigative articles on the state of the middle class around the world. He has also been shortlisted for the Canadian National Magazine Awards, in Politics.

He is the author of the book Arrival City (2010), in which he visited 20 locations on five continents to study the effects of the final wave of rural-urban migration on the cities of the world. The book is published in the United States (in 2011), Britain, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Spain, Australia and New Zealand, and China. It was the winner of the $35,000 Donner Prize, honouring the best book on public affairs in Canada, one of the five finalists for the 2011 Lionel Gelber Prize honouring the world's best book on international affairs, and for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

His column, Reckoning, appears on Saturdays in the newspaper's Focus section, and is generally devoted to intellectual and ideological concepts behind the news, from a political perspective that is broadly rooted in social democracy and liberalism.

Biography

Saunders, a citizen of the United Kingdom and Canada, was born in the city of Hamilton, Ontario educated in and around Toronto including a seven-year stint at York University, though he did not earn a degree. He has lived on two occasions in Britain and once in the United States of America. He first achieved journalistic notice in his early twenties as the Ottawa-based national bureau chief and writer for the Canadian University Press wire service. In the early 1990s he was a writer and editor for the left-leaning Canadian monthly This Magazine, and a researcher and freelancer for various Canadian journalists. In 1995 he joined the Globe and Mail as an editorial writer and feature writer. In 1996, he created a specialized writing position on media, culture, advertising and popular phenomena. In 1999, he became the paper's correspondent in Los Angeles, noted for his writing on changes in U.S. society. He began reporting from London in 2004. He has spent extensive time writing from Europe, Turkey, Iran, the Indian subcontinent, north Africa and Asia.

Books

In 2007, Saunders embarked on a three-year project to examine migrant neighbourhoods in about 20 places on five continents for a book titled Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World in Canada and Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping Our World in the United States, Britain and Australasia. It was an unusual book contract, involving seven countries in the initial publication deal.

The book chronicles the final shift of human populations from rural to urban areas, which Saunders argues is the most important development of the twenty-first century. He argues that this migration creates "arrival cities," neighbourhoods and slums on the urban margins that are linked both to villages and to core cities, and that the fate of these centres is crucial to the fortunes of nations.

The book was published in autumn of 2010 by Heinemann in Britain, Knopf in Canada, De Bezige Bij in the Netherlands, and Allen & Unwin in Australia and New Zealand, and in spring of 2011 by Pantheon in USA, Karl Blessing Verlag in Germany, Otava Publishing in Finland, Rye Field Publishing in Chinese (complex), and Debate/Mondadori in Spanish.

External links

• "Doug Saunders"
• "The Globe and Mail"
• "Arrival City"

References

• Information provided by the Globe and Mail, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, from Canadian Who's Who and from www.dougsaunders.net.
• Book information from www.arrivalcity.net

Persondata
Name	Saunders, Doug
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1967
Place of birth	Hamilton, Ontario
Date of death
Place of death