Mordecai Richler was an iconic writer whose career was as rich and varied as his persona was controversial and uncompromising. He spent almost 50 years as an influential essayist, novelist, screenwriter and children’s author.
Richler was loved and loathed throughout his professional life, which began in earnest with the publication of his fourth novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in 1959. His most successful books include St. Urbain’s Horseman (1971), for which he won the Governor General’s Literary Award; Joshua Then and Now (1980); Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989), for which he won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; and Barney’s Version (1997), for which he won both the Giller Prize for Fiction and the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.
Richler’s popular kids’ book Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1975) received numerous awards, and was made first into a stage play and then a live-action movie in 1978 (with another version produced in 1999). Two more books followed – Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur (1987) and Jacob Two-Two’s First Spy Case (1995) – along with a multi-episode animated TV series.
The various subjects of his hundreds of brilliantly penned essays, published in the most influential newspapers and magazines in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, range from Québécois and English Canadian nationalism (famously against) to sports and snooker (famously for). He published Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country in 1992.
Richler was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2001 shortly before his death.
