Kamal Al-Solaylee

Vancouver-based Kamal Al-Solaylee is the author of the bestseller Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes, winner of the 2013 Toronto Book Award and a finalist for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s Canada Reads and for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. His second book, Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone) won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and was finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards for Nonfiction. His third book of nonfiction, Return: Why We Go Back to Where We Come From, was published in 2021 and was named Book of the Year by the Globe and Mail and CBC Books. His nonfiction books mix personal narrative with geopolitics and field reporting. He has reported from 20 countries around the world, including Taiwan, Qatar, France, Britain, Jamaica, Malaysia, Egypt, Israel, Spain, Sri Lanka, Ghana the Philippines and the United States. He is a two-time nominee for Canada’s National Magazine Awards in the column category, winning the Gold Medal in 2019. More recently, he wrote and produced two documentaries for CBC’s flagship cultural program IDEAS on subjects as diverse as the Queen of Sheba and nineteenth-century English writer Wilkie Collins.

Kamal holds a PhD in English from Nottingham University and is the director of the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.