Val Ross

Valerie Jacqueline "Val" Ross (17 October 1950 – 17 February 2008) was a Canadian writer and winner of the 2004 Norma Fleck Award for Canadian children's non-fiction. She was also a journalist for the newspaper "The Globe and Mail", and won a National Newspaper Award in 1992 for critical writing.

Biography

Val Ross was born in Toronto in 1950, to Jack and Erma Ross, and had one younger brother. After completing high school at Jarvis Collegiate Institute, she considered becoming a visual artist and studied at St Martin's School of Art in London, England. Eventually she graduated with a bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto.

Before establishing her career as a freelance writer, she worked in urban planning and as a broadcaster at CBC.

She wrote for "Chatelaine", "Saturday Night", and "Toronto Life", and then was hired as a staff writer and editor at "Maclean's", where she worked in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She spent the remainder of her career at "The Globe and Mail", as a publishing reporter, as deputy editor of the Comment section, and as an arts reporter.

She wrote two children's books, 2003's "The Road to There" and 2006's "You Can't Read This". The former, a history of cartography, won the $10,000 Norma Fleck Award in 2004. "You Can't Read This" is a history of banned literature.

Her final book, the posthumous "Robertson Davies: A Portrait in Mosaic", is an oral history of Canadian writer Robertson Davies. She continued to work on the book even after being diagnosed with brain cancer on the day after her 57th birthday in 2007.

She was married to Morton Ritts, and had three children.

She died in Toronto on 17 February 2008 of brain cancer.

Selected works

* 2003: "The Road to There" (Norma Fleck Award winner)
* 2006: "You Can't Read This"
* 2008: "Robertson Davies: A Portrait in Mosaic" (posthumous)

References

* Martin, Sandra. " [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080218.OBITROSS18/TPStory/?query=Val+Ross Raw courage, strong convictions: She was a reporter's reporter] ", "The Globe and Mail", 2008-02-18, p. S11.