Mordecai Richler

Richler left McGill University without finishing a degree and spent years as a young expatriate in Paris and London, scraping by on journalism and radio scripts while writing his early novels, before returning to settle permanently in Montreal, the city his fiction never really left.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, drawn from the St. Urbain Street Jewish neighborhood of his own childhood, established the comic, unsentimental voice he sustained across decades of fiction, culminating late in his career with Barney's Version. He was equally prolific and combative as an essayist, and his broadsides against Quebec's language laws and nationalist politics, collected in Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!, made him a lightning rod within the province he called home.

He received Canada's highest civilian honors for his writing and died in Montreal in 2001 of cancer.