Christie Blatchford Books in Order

Christie Blatchford was a Canadian reporter, columnist, broadcaster, and nonfiction writer whose work moved from locker rooms to courtrooms, small-town disputes, and a war zone. She was born May 20, 1951, in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, a mining town where her father managed a hockey arena.

She grew up with her older brother, Les, and moved with her family to Toronto while in high school. After North Toronto Collegiate Institute, she studied journalism at Ryerson, now Toronto Metropolitan University, graduating in 1973 at the top of her class. At school, she wrote for both the Ryersonian and the Eyeopener.

Blatchford had already started part-time at The Globe and Mail while still a student. In 1975, she became Canada's first female sports columnist, writing in a field where women were rarely given such a visible role. Her sports years took her to hockey rinks, major events, and the noisy, competitive world behind the scores.

She didn't stay in one lane for long.

A move to the Toronto Star in 1977 brought her to general reporting and, in 1978, her first criminal trial. Courts became a lasting beat. At the Toronto Sun, she wrote personal and humorous columns before returning to harder news, and later worked at the National Post as well as returning to the Globe. Over 48 years, she wrote for all four of Toronto's major daily newspapers.

Her early books, Spectator Sports and Close Encounters, collected humor-oriented columns. Later she turned her reporting into full-length nonfiction. In Fifteen Days, drawn from reporting trips to Afghanistan and interviews with Canadian soldiers and their families, she follows the people connected to the 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry.

It won the 2008 Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction.

Blatchford's later books stay close to institutions and people caught inside them. Helpless is her account of the Caledonia land dispute and the response from police and government. Life Sentence revisits major criminal cases from decades of court reporting while arguing that Canada's justice system, particularly its judges, needs more scrutiny. Readers who return to her work often come for the directness, the reporting detail, and a willingness to make her own judgment clear.

That willingness also made her a divisive public figure. Her commentary, including writing on Indigenous, LGBT, and sexual-assault issues, drew serious criticism. She did not soften her opinions for easy agreement, which is part of why her columns sparked such strong reactions.

She won the National Newspaper Award for column writing in 1999 and was inducted into the Canadian News Hall of Fame in 2019. Blatchford was diagnosed with lung cancer late that year and died in Toronto on February 12, 2020, at 68. Her books remain a record of a reporter who kept following stories past the first headline.