User:K. Cuthbertson/sandbox

Kingston, ON-born author-editor is the author of seven books and the editor of one other. A veteran of more than 40 years in journalism, he has written for publications around the world, including the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Times of London, TV Guide, and various newspapers in the Canada and the U.S.

After graduating from Queen's University in Kingston, ON, with an Honors BA in History in 1974, Cuthbertson earned a Master of Arts degree in Journalism from Western University in London, ON, in 1975. He then worked as a journalist in Toronto, London, ON, and Regina. SK. In 1980, he returned to university to earn a law degree at Queen's University (while also serving 1980-83 as the weekend reporter at the Kingston-Whig Standard and as the Kingston correspondent for CBC Radio in Ottawa in 1980-81) before practising law for 18 months. After deciding that "the world didn't need another mediocre lawyer," as Cuthbertson puts it, he abandoned the legal profession in 1986 and returned to journalism, first as assistant editor and then editor of the Queen's Alumni Review magazine.

Cuthbertson edited the Review for 28 years. During that time, he rose each morning at five o'clock to write for two hours before getting ready to go to the office. His first book, Inside: The Biography of John Gunther with a Foreword by renowned American journalist William L. Shirer (Bonus Books), was published in 1992 to critical acclaim and earned him a nomination for a Governor General's Literary Award in the Non-Fiction category. He followed up that success in 1998 with Nobody Said Not to Go (Faber and Faber), a biography of New Yorker journalist Emily Hahn, and in 2014 by The Ring of Truth (Quarry Heritage Book), a whimsical historical novel set in Kingston, ON, during the Rebellion of 1837.

Following his 2014 retirement from Queen's, Cuthbertson wrote a biography titled A Complex Fate: William L. Shirer and the American Century (McGill-Queen's University Press), which included a Foreword by renowned CBS broadcast journalist Morley Safer of CBS. In 2017, Cuthbertson's next book The Halifax Explosion: Canada's Worst Disaster (HarperCollins Canada) was shortlisted for an Atlantic Book Award and achieved Canadian bestseller status. In 2020, he published 1945: The Year That Made Modern Canada (HarperCollins Canada), which was also a Canadian bestseller, and then in 2023 the book Blood on the Coal: The True Story of the Great Springhill Mine Disaster (HarperCollins Canada). In addition, Cuthbertson is also the author and editor of the booklet ''When the Ponies Ran: : The Untold Story of Kingston's Minor-league Professional Baseball Team. 1946-51 (Cataraqui Press, 2021), which was a project he undertook to keep busy" during the COVID pandemic; he wrote an introduction to No Hurry to Get Home (Seal Press), a 2000 reissue of Hahn's 1970 book Times and Places; and he wrote a Foreword for the 2023 non-fiction book Sudden Impact: The Almonte Train Wreck of 1942 (Burnstown Publishing). As an editor, Cuthbertson restored and re-edited Congo Solo: Misadventures Two Degrees North'' (McGill-Queen's University Press) a classic (but forgotten) 1933 travel book by Emily Hahn.

On the small screen, Cuthbertson appeared as one of the "talking heads" in the 2024 Netflix documentary series Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial. And the Los Angeles-based producer Mark Yellin Productions has optioned film rights to Cuthbertson's book Nobody Said Not to Go to serve as the partial basis for a forthcoming series on the adventures of Emily Han in Shanghai in the 1930s.