Taras Grescoe, the Montreal-based author of six non-fiction books (among them Sacré Blues, The End of Elsewhere, and The Devil’s Picnic), has been a professional, full-time freelance journalist and author for the last twenty-five years. His works of book-length reportage, which have been published in Toronto, New York, and London and translated into half a dozen languages, have received international critical acclaim. They have won major awards internationally and in Canada (QWF’s Mavis Gallant Prize, the Edna Staebler Prize, the Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction) and been finalists for other prestigious non-fiction prizes (the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing).
He is also a popular public speaker, with a large following on social media. His book Straphanger, about riding trains, subways, and buses in 14 cities around the world, is the subject of a lively keynote about the way cities are working to find alternatives to car-based urbanism and sprawl. In a presentation