Background

Paul Grescoe was born on January 1, 1939, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

Career

Paul Grescoe began his career with Canadian Press, later working for The Brandon Sun, The Winnipeg Tribune and The Toronto Telegram before becoming a staff writer and editor with The Canadian Magazine and Maclean's. During the 1970s and 1980s, he was the co-owner and editorial director of a chain of Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton city magazines.

He began his career as an author in 1985 with The Money Rustlers: Self-Made Millionaires of the New West, a study he wrote with David Cruise on the new breed of millionaires in Canada’s West. Quill & Quire reviewer Wayne Lilley questioned the authors’ criteria for defining a western entrepreneur, but he admired the book’s fluid prose and solid research, calling it "a valuable contribution to the growing mythology of Canadian business success."

After The Money Rustlers Grescoe wrote two mystery novels. Flesh Wound, published in 1991, introduces Ukrainian-Canadian detective Dan Rudnicki. The second Dan Rudnicki mystery, Blood Vessel, was Published in 1993.

Grescoe also used the novel’s setting - a cruise ship route between Alaska and Vancouver - in his next book, Alaska: The Cruise-Lover’s Guide, written with his wife, Audrey Grescoe. This tour guide, along with his subsequent Fragments of Paradise: British Columbia’s Wild and Wondrous Islands, was respected an outstanding contribution to the genre.

Grescoe returned to business coverage with The Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance, his 1996 study of Harlequin Books. Quill & Quire correspondent Andrew Allentuck admired the style, literacy, humor, and gift of the phrase.

He has been chronicling Western Canadian entrepreneurs for decades - from the legendary Vancouver billionaire Jim Pattison to the Winnipeg couple who founded the Harlequin romance empire. In 2002 he and his wife collaborated on the first general collection of English language letters written by Canadians, The book of letters: 150 years of private Canadian correspondence. The book of war letters: 100 years of Canadian wartime correspondence followed in 2003 and The book of love letters in 2005. With his wife, he is also a compiler of three recent volumes of private correspondence that illuminate Canadian history.

Achievements

• For the book Flesh Wound, Paul Grescoe became a finalist of the City of Vancouver Book Award in 1992. Books and magazine reviewers set a high value on his books.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Flesh Wound

    (When the nude, mutilated body of movie star Bobbi Flynn t...)

    1991
  • The Book of War Letters: 100 Years of Private Canadian Correspondence

    (This anthology includes letters that date as far back as ...)

    2005
  • The Book Of Love Letters: Canadian Kinship, Friendship, And Romance

    (In the 138 years since Confederation, kinfolk, friends, o...)

    2006
  • The Book of Letters: 150 Years of Private Canadian Correspondence

    (This is the first English-language collection of Canadian...)

    2004
  • Alaska: The Cruise Lover's Guide by Paul Grescoe

    (Flight Path is the first book to chronicle the amazing su...)

    1994
  • The money rustlers: Self-made millionaires of the new West 1985
  • Blood Vessel 1993
  • Fragments of Paradise: British Columbia's Wild and Wondrous Islands 1995
  • Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance 1996
  • Trip of a lifetime: The making of the Rocky Mountaineer 2000
  • Vancouver: Visions of a City 1993
  • The Mavericks : Lessons from the West's Winning Entrepreneurs 1999

Views

Quotations: “I have more than a journalistic interest in Lieben. It lies a three-minute walk from where my wife Audrey and I live on Bowen Island, and its vibrant history has been an inspiration to us as writers.”

Connections

Paul Grescoe is married to Audrey Grescoe.

Wife:

Audrey Grescoe

Son:

Taras Groscoe

Taras Grescoe writes essays, articles, and books. He is something of a non-fiction specialist.

His first book was Sacré Blues, a portrait of contemporary Quebec that won Canada's Edna Staebler Award for Non-Fiction, two Quebec Writers' Federation Awards, a National Magazine Award, and was short-listed for the Writers' Trust Award.