Acclaimed author and journalist Linden MacIntyre was born in Newfoundland, and raised in Cape Breton, the son of an itinerant hard-rock miner and a schoolteacher, both with deep Cape Breton roots. He attended a two-room village school until Grade 10, followed by a regional rural high school. He graduated from StFX in 1964 and went on to studies at Saint Mary’s University and Kings (Journalism). Later that year, he became parliamentary correspondent in Ottawa for The Halifax Chronicle Herald and The Mail Star. After two years on Parliament Hill, he returned to Halifax, then in 1967 returned to Ottawa as correspondent for The Financial Times of Canada. Two years later, he came back to Nova Scotia to work for The Chronicle Herald as correspondent, based in Sydney, NS. In 1976, he joined CBC Television as a current affairs producer/reporter based in Halifax. A year later, he launched a regional current affairs program, The MacIntyre File. In 1979, he initiated a legal action to confirm public access to affidavits supporting search warrants, the Attorney General of Nova Scotia, respondent. The issue reached the Supreme Court of Canada and in 1982 resulted in a majority decision affirming that affidavits relating to executed search warrants are public documents and available for public and media scrutiny. The decision since became a major asset in investigative journalism. In 1980, he moved to CBC network programming in Toronto. In 1981, he produced and hosted a television special on Acid Rain. That year, he joined the start-up team at The Journal, a CBC network current affairs segment broadcast nightly as companion to CBC’s The National. In late 1986, he moved to CBC Radio as host and national editor of Sunday Morning. Two years later, he returned to The Journal, for general assignments throughout North America, also in the Middle East, Latin America, the USSR, and other conflict areas. He began co-hosting the fifth estate on CBC TV in 1990, remaining 24 years. In 1999, he published the first of three novels loosely described as the Cape Breton trilogy: The Long Stretch (Stoddart), The Bishop’s Man (Random House, 2009), which won various literary awards including the Scotiabank Giller Prize for fiction; Why Men Lie (Random House 2012). In 2000, he published a non-fiction book, Who Killed Ty Conn (Penguin), with Theresa Burke, and in 2007, a memoir, Causeway; A Passage From Innocence (Harper Collins Canada), winner of the Edna Staebler Award for creative non-fiction. Two more novels came in 2014, Punishment (Random House), and in 2017, The Only Café. In 2019, he published The Wake: The Deadly Legacy of a Newfoundland Tsunami (Harper Collins Canada), followed in 2021 with The Winter Wives. He’s currently researching a non-fiction book. He’s won multiple awards including 1978 ACTRA’s Gordon Sinclair Award; 10 Gemini awards for work on the fifth estate; an International Emmy for work by the fifth estate; and various U.S. awards for work on co-productions with the PBS program Frontline.
