Christopher Shulgan

Christopher Shulgan is an award-winning writer who contributes essays and feature articles to various magazines and newspapers in the United States and Canada. He occasionally makes short documentary films, appears on such television talk shows as Michael Coren Live and speaks about his own writing as well as current political issues to a variety of schools, community groups, business organizations and literary festivals.

His critically acclaimed book, The Soviet Ambassador: The Making of the Radical Behind Perestroika, was in late 2008 shortlisted for the largest prize for non-fiction published in Canada, the $40,000 National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. The book argues that Mikhail Gorbachev's right-hand man, Aleksandr N. Yakovlev, was a major contributing factor to the Cold War's peaceful conclusion. Further, the book argues that Yakovlev's fervent belief in democracy was encouraged by the decade he spent in Canada as the Soviet ambassador to Ottawa. The book was released in 2008 by McClelland & Stewart.

In 2007, Shulgan won a Gold Medal in the political writing category at Canada’s National Magazine Awards for a feature in Toro magazine about a Canadian peacekeeper’s death in the Haitian slum of Cité Soleil. The nomination was the fifth time he was nominated for a National Magazine Award. Shulgan also has been nominated for a National Newspaper Award for a feature he wrote for the Ottawa Citizen about the work of traffic scientist Baher Abdulhai.

To research his heavily reported feature articles he has explored dangerous areas and fascinating subcultures, infiltrating the right-wing anti-immigration group, the Minutemen, retracing the route of a twenty-something pedophile killer through the backwoods of Maine and flying over the mountains of Costa Rica with one of the U.S. Department of Justice’s most wanted men, the Internet poker mogul Calvin Ayre.

Shulgan completed his undergraduate degree at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and has a Master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He’s edited and published a cross-Canadian magazine about youth culture, Neksis, and written a short film, The Memory Merchant, that was produced by the National Film Board in 2006. He's also a successful participant in the NFB's documentary-filmmaker training program, Momentum. His play, What Cool Is, was published in the Oxford University Press textbook, On Common Ground, and read at London’s Grand Theatre. His work also has been performed at the Ottawa Fringe Festival. He lives in Toronto.