Saul’s complete literary bio is also available in Français or Español.

John Ralston Saul, a long-time champion of freedom of expression, was elected President of International PEN in October 2009.

An award-winning essayist and novelist, Saul has had a growing impact on political and economic thought in many countries. Declared a “prophet” by TIME magazine, he is included in the prestigious Utne Reader’s list of the world’s 100 leading thinkers and visionaries. His works have been translated into 22 languages in 30 countries.

Saul is perhaps best known for his philosophical trilogy - Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense and The Unconscious Civilization. This was followed by a meditation on the trilogy - On Equilibrium: Six Qualities of the New Humanism.

In 2005 in The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, Saul warned that, like it or not, globalism was already collapsing and that if we did not act quickly we would be caught in a crisis and limited to emergency reactions. The Collapse of Globalism was re-issued in 2009 with an updated epilogue that addresses the current crisis.

In his most recent national bestseller, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada, Saul argues that Canada is a métis nation, heavily influenced and shaped by aboriginal ideas: egalitarianism, a proper balance between individual and groups, and a penchant for negotiation over violence are all aboriginal values that Canada absorbed.

He has received many national and international awards for his writing, most recently Chile's Pablo Neruda Medal. The Unconscious Civilization won Canada's Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction, as well as the Gordon Montador Award for Best Canadian Book on Social Issues. His Reflections of a Siamese Twin was chosen by Maclean's magazine as one of the ten best non-fiction books of the twentieth century. His novel, The Paradise Eater, won Italy's Premio Lettarario Internazionale.

He has published five novels, including The Birds of Prey, as well as The Field Trilogy, which deals with the crisis of modern power and its clash with the individual. It includes Baraka or The Lives, Fortunes and Sacred Honor of Anthony Smith, The Next Best Thing, and The Paradise Eater. De Si Bons Americains is a picaresque novel in which he observes the life of modern nouveaux riches Americans.

He is General Editor of the Penguin Extraordinary Canadians project, a series of 18 biographies that reinterprets important Canadian figures for a contemporary audience by pairing well-known Canadian writers with significant historical, political and artistic figures from 1850 onwards.

President of Canadian PEN from 1990-1992 and an active member of Centre québécois du PEN international, he helped create the Canadian PEN Writers In Exile Network in 2004. He is a member of the Norway based Council of Writers and Experts of ICORN (International Cities of Refuge Network).

John Ralston Saul is co-Chair of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, a national organization working with new citizens. He is also Founder and Honorary Chair of Le français pour l'avenir/French for the Future, an organisation which advances the use of French among secondary school students. He is Founder and Chair of the LaFontaine-Baldwin symposium, which advances an egalitarian and inclusive approach to democracy, and the patron of PLAN, a cutting edge organization serving people with disabilities. A Companion in the Order of Canada, he is also Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France. His 14 honourary degrees range from McGill University in Montréal to Herzen State Pedagogical University in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Born in Ottawa, Saul studied at McGill University and King's College, University of London, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1972.