Doug Saunders

Doug Saunders (born 1967) is a British-Canadian journalist and author, and columnist for The Globe and Mail, a Canadian national newspaper based in Toronto, Canada. He is the newspaper's international-affairs columnist, and a long-serving foreign correspondent formerly based in London and Los Angeles.

His journalism has won the National Newspaper Award, the Canadian counterpart to the Pulitzer Prize, on five occasions: in 1998, 1999, and 2000 for critical writing; and in 2006 and 2013 for column writing.^[1] In 2008, he was shortlisted for the award in international reporting, for a series of investigative articles on the state of the middle class around the world. He has also been shortlisted for the Canadian National Magazine Awards, in Public Issues.^[2]

He is the author of the book Arrival City (2011), in which he visited 20 locations on five continents to study the effects of the final wave of rural-urban migration on the cities of the world. It was the winner of the $35,000 Donner Prize, honouring the best book on public affairs in Canada, one of the five finalists for the 2011 Lionel Gelber Prize honouring the world's best book on international affairs, and for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.^[3] In 2015, Arrival City was on the 15-book longlist for the CBC's Canada Reads competition.

His 2012 book The Myth of the Muslim Tide documented the immigration, integration and political response to Muslim minorities in Europe and North America, and compared them to earlier populations of Roman Catholic and Jewish immigrants. It has been published in the United States, Canada, Germany (as Mythos Überfremdung) and Denmark.

His column, Reckoning, appears on Saturdays in the newspaper's Focus section, and is generally devoted to intellectual and ideological concepts behind the news, from a political perspective that is broadly rooted ideologically in social democracy and economically in liberalism; he also writes frequent weekday columns and posts on international affairs. Since 2013, he has also served as the Globe and Mail's Online Opinion Editor, where he created the Globe Debate Web portal, and launched several channels of online opinion/debate content and an interactive tool for online debates and panel discussions.^[4]

Biography

Saunders, a citizen of the United Kingdom and Canada, was born in the city of Hamilton, Ontario, educated in and around Toronto including a seven-year stint at York University, though he did not earn a degree. He first achieved journalistic notice in his early twenties as the Ottawa-based national bureau chief and writer for the Canadian University Press wire service. In the early 1990s he built a career in what was then the new field of online research and computer-assisted reporting for various Canadian journalists. He briefly worked as an editor for the left-leaning This Magazine. In 1995 he joined the Globe and Mail as an editorial writer and feature writer. In 1996, he created a specialized writing position on media, culture, advertising and popular phenomena. In 1999, he became the paper's correspondent in Los Angeles, noted for his writing on changes in U.S. society. He moved to London to become the paper's European Bureau Chief in 2004, and shifted the paper's European focus from breaking news to broader analysis of global trends. He has spent extensive time writing from Europe, Turkey, Iran, the Indian subcontinent, Asia and North Africa, including substantial reporting from Libya, Egypt and Tunisia during the Arab revolutions of 2011, and in Ukraine during its 2013-14 upheavals. His is married to the writer Elizabeth Renzetti and lives in Toronto.

Books

Arrival City

Starting in 2007, Saunders embarked on a three-year project to examine migrant neighbourhoods in about 20 places on five continents for a book titled Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World in Canada and Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping Our World in the United States, Britain and Australasia. It was an unusual book contract, involving seven countries in the initial publication deal.

The book chronicles the final shift of human populations from rural to urban areas, which Saunders argues is the most important development of the 21st-century. He argues that this migration creates "arrival cities," neighbourhoods and slums on the urban margins that are linked both to villages and to core cities, and that the fate of these centres is crucial to the fortunes of nations.

The book was published in autumn of 2010 by Heinemann Publishers in Britain, Knopf in Canada, De Bezige Bij in the Netherlands (under the title De Trek Naar De Stad), and Allen & Unwin in Australia and New Zealand, in 2011 by Pantheon Books in USA, Karl Blessing Verlag in Germany, and Rye Field Publishing in Chinese (complex) and by DVS Editora of Brazil in Portuguese. In 2012 it was published in China by Hangzhou MatrixBook, the country's first non-government-owned publisher (it was their first title); in autumn of 2012 it was published in French-language countries by Éditions du Seuil in France and Éditions du Boréal in Québec; it was published in Spanish by Debate/Mondadori in February 2014.

The Myth of the Muslim Tide

In 2012, Saunders wrote a research-based book titled "The Myth of the Muslim Tide," published in autumn of 2012 by Random House imprints in the United States, Canada and Germany, and in 2013 in Sweden. The book is a factual counterargument to works by such figures as Thilo Sarrazin, Mark Steyn, Bruce Bawer, and to the political movements of Geert Wilders and Anders Behring Breivik, which argue that Muslim immigrants cannot be assimilated, have high population-growth rates and are poised to conquer or dominate Western civilization. Using a team of researchers, Saunders presents data which make the case that these assertions cannot be true. He states in his introduction that the book is not a defence of Islam, which he does not admire or endorse, but an impartial look at the beliefs and activities of immigrant groups. Saunders also compares the experience of Muslim immigrants—both in their integration patterns and the political reception they receive—to earlier waves of religious-minority immigrants, notably European Roman Catholics and Eastern European Ashkenazic Jews.

The book is published in Canada by Knopf and the United States by Vintage, and in Germany by Karl Blessing Verlag.

References

• Information provided by the Globe and Mail, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, from Canadian Who's Who and from www.dougsaunders.net.
• Book information from www.arrivalcity.net

External links

• "Doug Saunders"
• "The Globe and Mail"
• "Arrival City"
• "The Myth of the Muslim Tide"
• "Globe Debate portal"

Footnotes