McGOOGAN, Ken 1947-

PERSONAL: Born January 18, 1947, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Education: Attended Concordia University, 1964-69; Ryerson Polytechnical University, B.A., 1974; University of British Columbia, M.F.A., 1976.

ADDRESSES: Home—185 Willow Ave., Toronto, Ontario M4E 3K4, Canada. Office—Calgary Herald, P.O. Box 2400, Station M, Calgary, Alberta T2N 0G3, Canada.

CAREER: Journalist, essayist, novelist, and biographer. Calgary Herald, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, literary editor. Worked as a journalist for Montreal Star and Toronto Star.

MEMBER: Writers Union of Canada.

AWARDS, HONORS: Award for best nonfiction book, Writers Guild of Alberta, 1991, for Canada's Undeclared War; Alberta Freedom of Expression Award; Wolfson College Fellowship, University of Cambridge, 1998; Christopher Award, Grant MacEwan Author's Award (co-winner), History Award, Canadian Authors' Association, and Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize, Writers' Trust of Canada, all 2001, all for Fatal Passage.

WRITINGS:

Canada's Undeclared War: Fighting Words from the Literary Trenches, Detselig (Calgary, Alberta, Canada), 1991.

Visions of Kerouac: A Novel, Pottersfield Press, 1993, revised as Kerouac's Ghost, R. Davies Publishing (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 1996.

Calypso Warrior, R. Davies Publishing (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 1995.

Chasing Safiya, Bayeux Arts (Calgary, Alberta, Canada), 1999.

Fatal Passage: The Untold Story of John Rae, the Arctic Adventurer Who Discovered the Fate of Franklin, HarperFlamingo (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2001, published as Fatal Passage: The True Story of John Rae, the Arctic Hero That Time Forgot, Carroll & Graf (New York, NY), 2002.

Ancient Mariner: The Amazing Adventures of Samuel Hearne, the Sailor Who Walked to the Arctic Ocean, HarperFlamingo (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2003, Carroll & Graf (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Ken McGoogan is a journalist and author in Calgary, Alberta. His recent creative nonfiction works have won him major awards and international acclaim. These successes arose after McGoogan honed his craft as both a journalist and a novelist. After working at The Toronto Star and The Montreal Star, he became literary editor at the Calgary Herald a position he held for more than fifteen years. By rising at 5 a.m. and writing before he went into the newspaper, he wrote several books, publishing four of them. Canada's Undeclared War: Fighting Words From the Literary Trenches was a controversial work that won the best non-fiction-book award from the Writers' Guild of Alberta.

In 1993 McGoogan published his first novel, Visions of Kerouac, a coming-of-age story about a young boy named Frankie who hits the road just like Beat author Jack Kerouac. In 1996 the book was released in a revised version titled Kerouac's Ghost. The original story is narrated by an adult Frankie, who has gone back to visit the places he traveled as a boy and is now accompanied by his wife. The point of view shifts radically in McGoogan's rewrite, with the actual ghost of Jack Kerouac telling the story. Ann Ireland noted in Quill and Quire that this shift in narrator could be problematic. She explained that "many readers know Kerouac's work intimately and will be convinced they know how his prose sounds and thinks. Comparisons are inevitable." However, Ireland was impressed with McGoogan's attempt to better his own writing, noting "How often do we get to see the process of novel making?"

McGoogan himself is on record as being uncertain which version of the novel he prefers: Visions of Kerouac or Kerouac's Ghost. McGoogan told CA that he would "like to take another run" at Calypso Warrior, his 1995 novel, which is set in Quebec and treats the politics of language. Aesthetically, he remains happier with Chasing Safiya. Called a metaphysical romp and a supernatural quest, McGoogan used a fast-paced narrative while employing both flashbacks and flashforwards. Though the book did not sell well, the writing of it prepared McGoogan for his next project—the breakthrough book Fatal Passage: The True Story of John Rae, the Arctic Hero That Time Forgot.

In 2002, McGoogan attracted international attention with Fatal Passage. That best-selling work of creative nonfiction won four major awards and was short-listed for three others. With Fatal Passage, McGoogan drew for the first time on both the fact-gathering skills he had honed during as a journalist and the narrative artistry he had developed while writing three novels. The book tells the story of John Rae, a young Scottish doctor and outdoorsman who sailed to Hudson Bay in 1832 and went on to become a leading northern explorer. He conducted a series of four expeditions between 1846 and 1854, on which he explored and mapped the Arctic coast. During that time the famed British expedition group, the Franklin party, arrived in the area in search of the Northwest Passage. The entire party died and the men were hailed as brave heroes back in Great Britain. Meanwhile, Rae located the passage and in the mid-1850s returned to Great Britain to tell the story of what actually happened to the Franklin party: they had resorted to cannibalism. This news was not well received by Britain's high society, especially Franklin's widow, and she and others saw to it that Rae never received the credit he deserved for his explorations.

McGoogan's biography is a work of "creative nonfiction," in which he uses fictional techniques—scenes, dialogue, point of view—to explore factual material. This approach, an historical variation on a tradition that includes landmark books by Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Piers Paul Read, remains controversial. Sherrill Grace questioned his use of this format in her review for Books in Canada, commenting that the author "should have pushed further and created a character of flesh and blood—a truly fictional hero—or he should have stuck to the documentary record." Other critics were more open to the technique. A Publishers Weekly critic acknowledged that "McGoogan's extensive research reveals compelling evidence," while David F. Pelly praised Fatal Passage in his review for Canadian Geographic, writing that "McGoogan's account of Rae's career is faultless, both seamlessly and engagingly told."

In 2003, McGoogan published a second volume employing the same narrative strategies: Ancient Mariner: The Amazing Adventures of Samuel Hearne, the Sailor Who Walked to the Arctic Ocean.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Beaver: Exploring Canada's History, October, 2001, William Barr, review of Fatal Passage, p. 44; December, 2001-January, 2002, Ken McGoogan, letter to the editor, p. 3.

Books in Canada, summer, 1995, Roger Burford Mason, review of Calypso Warrior, p. 41; November-December, 2001, Sherrill Grace, review of Fatal Passage, pp. 25-27.

Canadian Geographic, September, 2001, David F. Pelly, review of Fatal Passage, p. 84.

Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2002, review of Fatal Passage, p. 164.

New York Times Book Review, April 7, 2002, Roland Huntford, review of Fatal Passage, p. 8.

Publishers Weekly, April 1, 2002, review of Fatal Passage, p. 66.

Quill and Quire, July, 1995, Mark Noel Cosgrove, review of Calypso Warrior, p. 51; September, 1996, Ann Ireland, review of Kerouac's Ghost, p. 64.