Russell Smith was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and grew up in Halifax, Canada. He studied French literature at Queen’s, the University of Poitiers and at the University of Paris (III). He lives in Toronto.
He is an experienced teacher of creative writing, having taught in the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Guelph and at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. Several of his former students have published novels and memoirs. He has been writer-in-residence at the Toronto Reference Library and at Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon.
His fiction is largely contemporary in setting and satirical in tone. It has been nominated for several major awards, including the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, the Rogers/Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Trillium Prize, the Chapters/Books In Canada First Novel Award, the City of Toronto Book Prize, and the Danuta Gleed Award. He has twice won the National Magazine Award for fiction, and his novel Muriella Pent was selected as best fiction of its year by Amazon.ca.
Since 1989, he has been a freelance journalist and cultural commentator, publishing in Details, The New York Review of Books, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Toronto Life, NOW, Flare, Toro, Sharp, and many other journals. For 20 years, he wrote a regular weekly column on the arts for the national Globe and Mail. He frequently appears on the radio and television as an analyst of artistic and social trends.
An expert on language, he hosted the popular CBC Radio One program “And Sometimes Y”, about words and language, for two seasons.
In 2020, the House of Anansi published his English translation of Nadine Bismuth’s novel Un Lien Familial, as A Family Affair.
He has edited several anthologies of short fiction, including Best Canadian Stories 2018 (Biblioasis). He is currently an acquiring editor of fiction and non-fiction at Dundurn Press.
His most recent novel, Self Care, was named a Best Book of 2025 by the Globe and Mail.
