Background
John Perrie Ibbitson was born on June 9, 1955, in Gravenhurst, Ontario, Canada. He is a son of Joseph Henry Ibbitson, a grower and florist, and Phyllis Alberta Ibbitson (maiden name, Boyd), a flower shop owner.
editor journalist novelist playwright writer author
John Perrie Ibbitson was born on June 9, 1955, in Gravenhurst, Ontario, Canada. He is a son of Joseph Henry Ibbitson, a grower and florist, and Phyllis Alberta Ibbitson (maiden name, Boyd), a flower shop owner.
John Perrie Ibbitson’s early school years likely contributed to his well-honed reading and writing skills. Although having poor eyesight, the boy received large support and encouragement from educators. By grade five, he was reading well ahead of his class and writing well enough to have a story published in the Gravenhurst News. Over time, glasses dealt effectively with his short-sightedness.
Later, in 1973, he volunteered and was chosen to write a play that the school’s drama club would perform in the local drama festival.
Following his parents’ expectation to see his son as a lawyer, Ibbitson entered Trinity College at the University of Toronto to study political science after high school. During his university years, Ibbitson continued to write plays and produced some for the town of Gravenhurst, Ontario, Muskoka Summer Theatre, and other patrons. Contrary to parental will, but perhaps not too surprisingly, Ibbitson graduated in 1979 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in drama.
At the urging of a friend, John Ibbitson applied to the University of Western Ontario’s Master of Arts program in journalism. He was accepted in 1987 and graduated the following year.
In early 1993, Ibbitson learned that he was one of four Southam Fellowship recipients. The Fellowship in Journalism provided him with one year of study at the University of Toronto. The experience was an important one for the young author. As it came to an end, he realized his writing interests were leaning in a new direction – towards nonfiction writing.
The start of John Perrie Ibbitson’s career can be counted from his high school and college years. During this time, he concentrated on playwriting. One of his earliest works, ‘I Pagliacci’ (later renamed ‘The Clown’) was created when he was seventeen. The work was well received and provided its author with several awards. The next one titled ‘Catalyst’ followed in 1978. Both plays hinted at the fast pace and witty dialogue that would characterize Ibbitson’s later work. Other works of the period included ‘First Taste’, a three-act drama commissioned by Trinity College, ‘Shadows’, a two-act historical drama, commissioned for the Centennial of Gravenhurst, and ‘Hardy's Belief’, two-act drama, commissioned by Muskoka Summer Theatre.
After graduation, Ibbitson continued his career as a playwright. He worked as a box office clerk in London’s West End and immersed himself in the theater. The experience influenced his writing. He set his next play, ‘Mayonnaise’, a comedy, in London. On December 30, 1980, Ibbitson’s first professionally produced play, opened at the Phoenix Theatre in Toronto to good reviews. Three years later, Ibbitson had the opportunity to co-write an adaptation of ‘Mayonnaise’ as a three-part television sitcom for CBC Vancouver. Ibbitson followed up on the success of Mayonnaise, the play, with a farce. ‘Country Matters’ opened at the Phoenix Theatre in Toronto on December 28, 1982.
After the success, the author’s drama muse ran away. To supplement his income, he was working as an editorial secretary at Collier Macmillan, a publishing firm in Toronto, from 1984 to 1986. Collier Macmillan was developing a series of high interest, low vocabulary adventure stories for young adults at the time. By 1986, Ibbitson was promoted to junior editor. He had served in that capacity for one year.
By 1993, Ibbitson had written seven novels for young adults. The first five were controlled vocabulary stories for Series Canada and Series 2000. The last two were full-length historical novels. All the books featured fast-paced, tightly-structured plots and intelligent, sensitive, teenage male narrators confronting personal issues and challenges. Ibbitson’s first novel appeared in 1985. The Wimp introduced Randy Stubbs, a self-declared “wimp” who, at the urging of his friend, decides to run for student council against one of the most popular boys at his high school. The story’s scenario provided opportunities for plenty of adolescent male slapstick and set the stage for two more Wimp books.
In 1988 he took a summer job with the Ottawa Citizen as full-time employment. While working there as a reporter, the journalist continued to write for Series 2000. ‘Starcrosser’ and ‘The Big Story’ were published in 1990. ‘The Big Story’, his last book for the series, mirrored his own career. It presented a teenage protagonist working part-time for a newspaper.
John Perrie Ibbitson’s career change prompted a new awareness of the need to package facts in formats accessible to readers. The memory caused him to consider writing a full-length Canadian historical novel for young adults. Soon afterward, Ibbitson began to work on ‘1812: Jeremy and the General’, the story of fifteen-year-old Jeremy Fields, a dispossessed orphan caught up in the 1812 American invasion of Upper Canada. Ibbitson’s approach to writing the book involved inviting three history professors and a panel of teenage readers to provide feedback on his work in progress. In his next novel, ‘The Night Hazel Came to Town’, Ibbitson opted for another historical event and setting, combined action-packed adventure with a coming-of-age story. Set in 1954, it capitalized on key events of that year in Toronto, including Marilyn Bell’s successful swim across Lake Ontario and Hurricane Hazel’s destructive sweep through Toronto.
Ibbitson’s new interest to historical writing was well-timed. The one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Ottawa Citizen was coming up and a celebratory essay project had been proposed. Originally willing to write an entire collection of essays, the author ended up writing two essays and editing the overall collection when others became interested in contributing. The collection, ‘Fair Play and Daylight: The Ottawa Citizen Essays’ was published in 1995. Then, the journalist left the periodical and joined the staff of Southam News as a correspondent the following year.
The promotion provided Ibbitson with direction for his next project. While working in the periodical, the author found himself heavily involved in the analysis of political events in Ontario. When he thought occurred that someone should write a book about Premier Mike Harris’s leadership, it didn’t take him long to decide that he could and would write that book. Ibbitson’s first nonfiction volume, ‘Promised Land: Inside the Mike Harris Revolution’, was published in 1997.
Two years later, Ibbitson continued to cover Ontario politics in The Globe and Mail. By 2001, he had become a Washington bureau chief. After a year in the United States, he came back to the homeland where he occupied the post of political affairs columnist in Ottawa. In 2007, the journalist came again to Washington, D. C. where he had served as a columnist for two more years. By 2012, Ibbitson was promoted to Chief Political Writer of the periodical. He has been invited to many Canadian television news programs as a political analyst.
In the winter of 2014, John Perrie Ibbitson served as a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ontario. A year later, in summer, he published a biography of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
One of the latest Ibbitson’s works on politics co-authored with Darrell Bricker, ‘Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline’, was issued on February 5, 2019.
John Perrie Ibbitson is an accomplished expert in Canadian and international politics. His career speaks to his versatility as an author. As a prolific playwright, novelist, and journalist, he has produced many plays for the stage, and more than a dozen books, both fiction for young adults and volumes on various political concerns.
Since the beginning of his professional journey, his innate talent of a writer has been marked by a great number of awards and distinctions, including Georgian Bay Drama Festival Best Actor Award and Award of Merit for Original Script, Governor General's Award for English-language children's literature, and Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. The author has also been nominated and shortlisted for the Donner Prize, the National Newspaper Award, the Trillium Award, the City of Toronto Book Award, and the National Newspaper Award.
Ibbitson’s latest work, a collaboration with Darrell Bricker, ‘Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline’ was translated into Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and Korean.
(An award-winning journalist and leading international soc...)
2019(Football season is looming ahead and, much to his surpris...)
1986(A book written by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson argue...)
2013(In this compelling, and ultimately hopeful book, John Ibb...)
2005When faced with the task of creating stories that would interest reluctant teen readers, John Perrie Ibbitson has drawn upon events from his own youth. He has also used humor to offer an alternative perspective on the problems and anxieties common to young people.
Quotations:
"Politics and the stock market are the two most ruthless environments outside an actual battlefield. The market creates and destroys wealth; politics creates and destroys power. Power and wealth are both highly prized, and those who acquire large amounts of either are unlikely to be gentle souls."
"The majority of the population in Ontario and the West was of the opinion that they should not have to work harder and longer to pay for people in the East not to work at all."
John Perrie Ibbitson is gay.
Quotes from others about the person
"Ibbitson’s mouth is as fast as that of Gordon Korman, the reigning monarch of the TV-scale comedy in book form." Tim Wynne-Jones, author
