Patricia Pearson is a critically-acclaimed journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, among other publications. Her five books have been published in several countries. She was a 2003 finalist for the Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour for her best-selling comic novel, Playing House, which was later adapted for television. This has little to do with the fact that Pearson’s serious reporting and commentary appears regularly on matters ranging from wildlife conversation to mental health to murder, in media spanning the New York Times to NPR. Nor that she recently oversaw the research for a History Channel documentary on “The Science of the Soul,” and has written a book about what people experience when they die.
The documentary version of her book, A Brief History of Anxiety…Yours and Mine aired on the CBC in 2012, and recently won a Rocky Award from the Banff Global Television Festival. She has also won three National Magazine Awards, and the Arthur Ellis Award for best non-fiction book of 1998.