ABOUT
Nigel Beale was born in Toronto, moved to the Channel Islands at age five, banged around England for a while and then returned to Saskatchewan at age 11. It was a brutal culture shock.
He studied Public Relations in the first course of its kind ever offered at what is now Mount Royal University in Calgary. He subsequently earned an Honours Degree in Political Science from the University of Saskatchewan and a Masters Degree in Public Administration at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He figured he’d use this to lobby government, and landed a job with an important trade association in Toronto. Even got his picture in the Globe and Mail.
It was a total disaster.
He bounced back however, moving to Ottawa the next year taking a job with the Board of Trade as membership director. Membership doubled in less than two years. Very confidently he next launched Nigel Beale and Associates Ltd., a company that offered writing, and magazine advertising sales representation services. In this capacity he launched the Ottawa offices of a feature news distribution firm called News Canada. Sales took off and with them Nigel’s writing career.
Over the subsequent years he wrote thousands of feature news articles, working with virtually every government department in the National Capital Region plus firms in the pharmaceutical and other sectors in Montreal. Thousands of editors chose to use these articles over the years. They generated a readerships in the, yes, hundreds of millions. He also oversaw the writing and production of lots of feature “news” TV and radio spots which were distributed to and aired by hundreds of broadcast media outlets across Canada and the United States.
From 1994 to 1999 he wrote a monthly column called ‘On Media’ for Strategy magazine, one of Canada’s leading marketing journals.
In 2005 he left the world of commerce to devote his life to books and travel, and to interviewing ‘best practitioners’ in the book universe.
To date he has conducted some 600 interviews with authors, poets, book publishers, booksellers, book editors, book collectors, book-makers, book scholars, book critics, book designers, book publicists, literary agents and many others inside the book trade and out - from writer to reader, all for a podcast he hosts called The Biblio File.
Bio
Nigel Beale is a freelance writer/broadcaster who specializes in literary journalism. His book reviews and features have appeared in, among other places, The Washington Post, The Toronto Globe and Mail, The Guardian, Canadian Bookseller magazine, LOGOS and Canadian Art magazine. For more than a decade he has hosted a popular podcast on books called The Biblio File for which he has interviewed, among others, Alaa Al Aswany, Alice Notley, Nadeem Aslam, Margaret Atwood, Derek Walcott, Harlan Coben, Tim Winton, David Mitchell, Ha Jin, Yann Martel, Amitav Ghosh, Rawi Hage, Junot Diaz, Larry McMurtry, Miriam Toews, Eimear McBride, Tim Parks and Ivan Klima.
He is the founder and editor of LiteraryTourist.org for which he travels to various cities around the world, visiting/attending/ participating in and reporting on: literary destinations, book fairs, writers festivals, writers' houses, literary hotels, writers workshops, etc.
