fiction.wikisort.org - Writer

Joe Fiorito is a Canadian journalist and author.

Joe Fiorito
Born	1948 Fort William (Thunder Bay), Ontario
Occupation	Newspaper columnist
Nationality	Canadian
Period	1996-2017
Genre	Essays
Notable works	The Song Beneath the Ice
Notable awards	1996 National Newspaper Award 2003 Toronto Book Award

Early life

Fiorito was born June 22, 1948 in Fort William, Ontario. His father was a mailman and a musician. His mother was a waitress. He had three brothers. He wrote about his family life in the acclaimed memoir, "The Closer We Are To Dying".[1][2]

Career

After working for several years in community development, he joined the CBC in 1980 as the manager of CFFB Radio in Frobisher Bay, now Iqaluit. He then worked as a CBC Radio producer in Regina from 1985 to 1991. While at the CBC, he was president of his union local and in 1998 he was elected president of the National Radio Producers' Association.]]

He left the CBC to become a freelance journalist in Montreal, where he was a columnist for HOUR magazine, and the Montreal Gazette. Montreal Gazette. He won a National Newspaper Award for his Gazette columns in 1995.

He moved to Toronto in 1997, where he wrote city columns for the National Post, The Globe and Mail and "The Toronto Star". His columns focussed on the small details of daily life, with a particular focus on social housing, mental health issues, addictions, and poverty. His column about the eviction and subsequent death of a tenant in community houing led to a public inquiry and a series of reforms in the treatment of elderly tenants in community housing in Toronto.

Personal life

Joe Fiorito is married to Susan Mahoney. His son, Matt, is a punk musician in Vancouver.

Awards and Honours

• 1995 - National Newspaper Award for columns
• 2000 - Brassani Prize for Short Fiction
• 2001 - Acerbi Prize nomination
• 2003 - Toronto Book Award for The Song Beneath the Ice
• 2010 - Al Gosling Award
• 2011 - R. Gordon Bell Award
• 2012 - Canadian Helen Keller Centre Award
• 2021 - The Kouhi Award

Bibliography

• Comfort Me with Apples (Nuage Editions, 1994 columns; updated McClelland & Stewart, 2000)
• Tango on the Main (Nuage Editions, 1996 columns)
• The Closer We Are to Dying (McClelland & Stewart, 1999) - memoir [3][4][5]
• The Song Beneath the Ice (M&S 2002 novel)
• Union Station (M&S 2006 non-fiction)
• Rust Is A Form of Fire (Guernica Editions 2015 poetry)
• The Life Crimes and Hard Times of Ricky Atkinson, Leader of the Dirty Tricks Gang (Exile Editions 2017 co-author)
• City Poems (Exile Editions 2018 poetry)
• All I Have Learned Is Where I Have Been (Signal Editions 2020 poetry)

References

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