The Geography of Hope

So a kind soul contacted me recently about putting up and expanding a Wikipedia entry on me. I was happy to oblige and sent him a few autobiographical paragraphs by email, but Wikipedia's rules apparently require that I publish that info here in order for it to be a proper source.

So here it is:

Chris Turner is the author of The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the
World We Need (Random House Canada, 2007) and the international
bestseller Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Documented an Era
and Defined a Generation (Random House Canada, Da Capo Press [USA],
Ebury Press [UK & intl], 2004). He writes a monthly column on
sustainability for the Focus section of The Globe & Mail (Sept
2007-present).

Turner's feature writing has received four Canadian National Magazine
Awards and six honourable mentions. The four awards were all for
stories that appeared in the late, great Shift Magazine from 1999 to
2003; his Shift essay "Why Technology Is Failing Us (And How We Can
Fix It)," a call to arms for the green revolution, was awarded the
President's Medal for General Excellence at the 2001 National Magazine
Awards (the highest honour in Canadian magazine writing). The essay
was included in The Presence of Excellence, a 2002 anthology of the
best Canadian magazine writing of the previous 25 years, and formed
the nucleus for his 2007 book The Geography of Hope. His reporting on
pop culture, technology and the environment has also appeared in The
Independent (UK), The Times (UK), Time Magazine, Utne Reader, Canadian
Geographic, Azure, The Walrus, enRoute, Up!, Maisonneuve and Swerve
(the Calgary Herald's Friday supplement), among others. He has also
published a handful of short stories which very few people have read.

Turner was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, on 25 July 1973, and grew
up a military brat in the Canadian North, the American Midwest, and
the Schwarzwald of southwestern Germany. He holds a history degree
from Queen's University, Kingston (B.A., Hons., 1996), and a
journalism degree from Ryerson University, Toronto (Bachelor of
Applied Arts, 1998). He began his journalism career in Toronto with an
editorial internship at Shift Magazine while still a student at
Ryerson.

Turner launched his freelance writing career with his first Shift
feature, "Flipflops, a Desktop, & One Billion Reasons Never To Leave,"
about the internet gambling boom in Antigua; it ran in the May 1999
issue and was awarded a gold medal for "one-of-a-kind articles" at the
1999 National Magazine Awards. He has been a freelance writer ever
since. His cover essay "The Simpsons Generation" for Shift's 10th
Anniversary issue (Sept/Oct 2002) precipitated the publishing industry
interest that led to the writing of his first book, Planet Simpson.
(Turner still thinks "The Simpsonian Institution" would've been a
better title, but so it goes.) Turner lived for a year in the Indian
Himalaya and another year in the Canadian Rockies, and now resides in
Calgary, Alberta, with his wife, the photographer Ashley Bristowe, and
their daughter, Sloane.