Charlotte Gray is one of Canada's best-known writers of literary non-fiction. Born in Sheffield, England, and educated at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, she began her writing career in England as a magazine editor and newspaper columnist. After coming to Canada in 1979, she worked as a political commentator, book reviewer and magazine columnist before she turned to biography and popular history.
Charlotte is the author of twelve non-fiction books, plus countless magazine articles and book reviews. Her latest book is Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons: The Lives of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt (September 2023 publication).
In 2016, to contribute to Canada's Sesquicentennial year, Charlotte published The Promise of Canada: People and Ideas That Have Shaped Our Country, which became a major bestseller and won the Ottawa Book Award. Her previous book, The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master and The Trial that Shocked a Country, won the Toronto Book Award and the Toronto Heritage Book Award, and was long-listed for the B.C. Non-fiction Award, and shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Award, the Ottawa Award for Non-Fiction and the Evergreen Award. An adaptation of her 2010 bestseller Gold Diggers, Striking It Rich in the Klondike was broadcast as a television miniseries in early 2014 on the US Discovery Channel, under the title Klondike. In 2008, Charlotte published Nellie McClung, a short biography of Canada's leading women's rights activist in the Penguin Series, Extraordinary Canadians. Her 2006 bestseller, Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell, won the Donald Creighton Award for Ontario History and the City of Ottawa Book Award. It was also nominated for the Nereus Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize, the National Business Book Award and the Trillium Award.
Her previous five books, which include Sisters in the Wilderness, The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, Flint & Feather, The Life and Times of E. Pauline Johnson and A Museum Called Canada, were all award-winning bestsellers. In 2014, she was short-listed as "Author of the Year" by the Canadian Booksellers Association. Sisters in the Wilderness was chosen by the Literary Review of Canada as one of the 25 most important books of LRC's first 25 years.
Charlotte appears regularly on radio and television as a political and cultural commentator, and is a regular book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, Literary Review of Canada and Canada's History. She has also written for the UK Guardian, Walrus, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and most major Canadian magazines. She has been a celebrity panelist, championing Jane Urquhart's novel Away, in CBC Radio's annual battle of the books, Canada Reads, and was the advocate for Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister, for the CBC series The Greatest Canadian. She has been a judge for several of Canada's most prestigious literary prizes, including the Giller Prize for Fiction, the Charles Taylor Prize for Non-fiction and the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. In 2019, she was the only Canadian member of the jury for the Cundill Prize, the distinguished international award for the best English-language history book of 2018. In 2023, she was a member of the inaugural jury for the Weston International Award for Non-fiction, administered by the Writers Trust.
An Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University, Charlotte is a recipient of the Pierre Berton Award for distinguished achievement in popularizing Canadian history. She is former chair of the board of Canada's National History Society, which publishes the magazine Canada's History, and of the Art Canada Institute/Institut de l'Art Canadien. For twelve years she sat on the board of the Ottawa International Authors Festival. She currently sits on the boards of the Canadian-American Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, and the Sir Winston Churchill Society of Ottawa.
Charlotte has been awarded five honorary doctorates, from Mount St. Vincent University, Nova Scotia, the University of Ottawa, Queen's University, York University and Carleton University. Charlotte is a member of the Order of Canada, a Library and Archives Canada Scholar, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Charlotte lives in Ottawa with her husband George Anderson. They have three adult sons.
