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John Ralston Saul was born in Ottawa on June 19, 1947. The son of an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces, he grew up on a number of different military bases accross the country. He attended McGill University in the late 1960s, receiving an Honours B.A. in Political Science in 1969, and went on to receive a Ph.D. in Economics and Political Science from King's College, University of London in 1972. It was Saul's research for his doctoral thesis on the French Government under Charles de Gaulle that led him to move to Paris in the early 1970s. After completing his PhD he stayed on in Paris, running a subsidiary of a British investment firm and beginning work on his first novel. Saul returned to Canada in 1975 and was able to complete his book -- published first in France as Mort d'un Général (1977) and then in Canada as Birds of Prey (1977) -- while working in Calgary for Petro-Canada as the assistant to Maurice Strong, the firm's founder. Leaving Calgary and Petro-Canada in 1978, he went on to hold a number of other positions, including that of Secretary for the Canada-Chinese Trade Council. John Ralston Saul has also played an active role in a number of non-profit organizations, including the Canadian chapter of PEN International, for which he has served at various times as its Secretary, Vice-President, and President. He currently lives in Toronto.

In the twenty-one years since the publication of Birds of Prey, which sold over two million copies in France alone, Saul has published four more novels and four extremely successful works of non-fiction. Each of the novels in Saul's loosely-knit "Field Trilogy" deals in some way with the confrontation between the individual and the power structures of the modern world. Baraka, or the Lives, Fortunes and Sacred Honor of Anthony Smith is a story of international intrigue in which a multinational oil company, in their efforts to gain oil rights in Vietnam, becomes a key player in a multi-million dollar arms deal. The focus of The Next Best Thing moves to similar themes within the art world and chronicles the passions and obsessions of an art smuggler in Burma. The last novel of the trilogy, The Paradise Eater, is set in Bangkok and again deals with the world of politics and the illicit arms trade. His most recent novel, De si bons américains (1994), deals again with the clash between individuals and the new corporate élite of the Western world.

This same theme, of course, has been at the heart of all John Ralston Saul's works of non-fiction. His best-known work thus far is undoubtedly Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. Saul argues in that book that the Enlightenment's understanding of "Reason" has been entirely corrupted by the power élites of the last century who are increasingly motivated by the the goal of serving their own self-interest and notions of "efficiency" rather than focusing on the interests of the public good. In The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, Saul takes apart, word by word, the terms and concepts whose meanings have been misused, perverted, or simply ignored by the élite who shape the popular discourse of our time. More important though, he also attempts to lay out the linguistic weapons necessary to fight the status quo of the corporatist agenda. In The Unconscious Civilization (1995), stems from his 1995 Massey Lectures of the same name. While, at just over two hundred pages, The Unconscious Civilization is Saul's slimmest volume so far, it contains a concise and highly persuasive argument. Saul contends that our society has become so dominated by corporatism and conformism that we have moved far away from concerns of the individual and of democracy. To reverse this tide, he argues, we must reexamine the meaning of terms such as "individualism" and "democracy" and then apply that knowledge in such a way that allows us become (again) a "conscious civilization."

If Voltaire's Bastards is John Ralston Saul's most popular and successful work so far, then his most recent book, Reflections of A Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century (1997), may well be his most important, at least for his fellow Canadians. Saul argues that in Canada we continually try to deny our complexity as a country in an attempt to align ourselves to what is largely an American or European model of the monolithic nation state. By simplifying the circumstances of what is a truly complex conglomerate of peoples, regions, cultures and linguistic groups, we have allowed ourselves to become blinded to our chief strength and unique character as a nation: our complexity. In what is one of the best books on Canada in recent memory, Saul does for Canada what he has done so well for the rest of the Western world: by exposing the fallacies, deceptions, and outright delusions inherent in the ideology of today's elite, he also shows us a way to fight our way out of the mess they have left us in. The answers for Canada, Saul contends, lie in embracing the complexity of our history, our society, and our land.

Over the course of his career as a writer, John Ralston Saul has earned many awards and accolades. He has won two major literary awards, the 1990 Italian Premerio Litterrario Internazionale for The Paradise Eater and the 1996 Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction for The Unconscious Civilisation. In France, Saul was recently named a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1995 he was named the Canadian Humanist of the Year. That same year, The Utne Reader included him in their feature "100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life." Saul's books have been sold and published all over the world and have been translated into many languages, including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, and Czech. 1998 will see the French translation of Reflections of a Siamese Twin published in Québec.

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