Robertson Davies

Davies, the son of a newspaper-owning senator, studied at Queen's University and Oxford before an early career as an actor and stage manager at London's Old Vic, where he met and married the actress Brenda Mathews. Returning to Canada, he spent decades running his family's Peterborough Examiner as editor and publisher, writing satirical newspaper columns under the pen name Samuel Marchbanks alongside his own fiction.

He was the founding Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, a graduate residence he shaped in his own erudite, ceremonial image. Fifth Business, steeped in Jungian psychology, saints, and small-town Ontario guilt, opened the Deptford Trilogy that made his international reputation, followed later by the Cornish Trilogy.

Repeatedly shortlisted for the Booker Prize without ever winning it, he remained Canada's most celebrated man of letters until his death in 1995.