Giles Blunt

Giles Blunt is a Canadian novelist and screenwriter. He grew up in North Bay, Ontario, a small city similar to the Algonquin Bay of his John Cardinal novels. After studying English literature at the University of Toronto, he moved to New York City to study film at NYU and lived there for the next twenty years, before moving back to Toronto. His first experience in television was writing the pilot for Diamonds (1987), a comedic detective show starring Nick Campbell. His first novel, Cold Eye, was published in nine languages and was filmed as The Colors of the Devil (1997), directed by award-winning French director Allain Jessua. The Cardinal novels have been published in more than a dozen languages, and the first in the series, Forty Words for Sorrow, won the British Crime Writers Silver Dagger award, and the second, The Delicate Storm, won the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis award for best novel, as did number six, Until the Night. Forty Words for Sorrow was adapted into Season 1 of the CTV limited series Cardinal, Blackfly Season became Season 2, and Season 3 is drawn from By the Time You Read This and Crime Machine. In 2018 Cardinal won six CSA awards, including Best Actor in a limited series for Billy Campbell. Blunt has twice been nominated for the Dublin IMPAC award, and was recently granted an honorary doctorate by Nipissing University. The CBC numbered Forty Words for Sorrow among the 100 novels that make us proud to be Canadian. His tenth novel, The Hesitation Cut, was published by in 2015, and a volume of poems, Vanishing Act, in 2016.