Nino Ricci

In June, Nino Ricci was honoured with the Order of Canada, along with journalist and non-fiction writer Malcolm Gladwell of The Tipping Point fame, Saskatchewan-born poet Lorna Crozier, and others.

Ricci was born at Leamington, Ontario in 1959, the child of Italian immigrants. He was educated at York University, Concordia University and the University of Florence.

Lives of the Saints was published in 1990. It won the Governor-General's Award and three other prizes. The Glass House, a sequel, came out in 1993 and the third in the trilogy, Where Has She Gone? appeared in 1997 and was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

In 2004 his trilogy was filmed as a mini-series starring Sophia Loren. The first book was reissued in 2010, the twentieth anniversary of its original publication.

In 2003 he published Testament, a novel about Jesus which the Christian Science Monitor describes as "unsettling."

Ricci received his second Governor General's Award for fiction for The Origin of Species, set in Montreal. The same year he appeared in Toronto to receive an award from the Canadian Authors Association, and gave a humorous and engaging speech, in which he recalled, among other things, his school days with Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff. The book is reviewed by Quill and Quire.

Ricci is a versatile and accomplished writer who has also published a variety of essays and short stories as well as a book about former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.