Richard B Wright Books in Order

If you want the award-winning place to begin: Clara Callan
If you want wry midlife fiction: The Weekend Man → In The Middle Of A Life → Adultery
If you want memory, grief, and second chances: October → Nightfall
If you want a family story rooted in Ontario: The Age of Longing
If you want the writer behind the novels: A Life with Words

Richard B. Wright was born in Midland, Ontario, on March 4, 1937, and grew up in a working-class family during the Second World War. That small-town Ontario world stayed with him. Again and again, he returned to ordinary streets, family tensions, quiet disappointments, and the stubborn hope people carry through them.

He studied radio and television arts at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute, graduating in 1959. After that he worked as a copywriter for newspapers and radio stations, then moved into publishing at Macmillan Canada. The book world was already his day job, but writing fiction was the thing he kept circling back to.

He always wanted to be a writer.

His first book was a children's title, but his first full-length novel, The Weekend Man, was the real beginning of his life as a novelist. He wrote it over about eighteen months while staying at his wife's family cottage in Quebec. The book introduced readers to one of Wright's great strengths, his ability to make an ordinary, slightly lost life feel vivid, funny, and painfully real.

Still, early praise did not mean an easy career. In his thirties he went back to school at Trent University, earned a degree in English in 1972, and later taught at Ridley College in St. Catharines. For years he balanced teaching, family life, and fiction, often getting up at 4:30 in the morning so he could write before beginning a day in the classroom.

That long stretch of steady work shaped the books that followed. The Weekend Man and In the Middle of a Life look hard at drifting men, middle age, work, marriage, and the strange comedy of feeling stuck. The Age of Longing and October turn more openly toward memory, regret, and the way the past keeps talking back. Readers often come to Wright for the calm surface of the prose and stay for the emotional weight underneath.

Clara Callan, published in 2001, changed the scale of his career. Set on the eve of the Second World War and built around the lives of two sisters, it won the Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award for Fiction, and the Trillium Book Award. It also sent many readers back to his earlier novels, which were republished and rediscovered.

He wrote about people who were not trying to be heroic.

That is part of why later books such as Adultery, Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard, and Nightfall still feel close at hand. The range is wide, contemporary moral trouble, historical invention, late-life grief, second chances, but the voice stays patient and attentive. In A Life with Words, his memoir, he looked back at childhood, depression, publishing, teaching, and the slow making of a writing life. Even there, he sounded less like a public monument than a sharp, observant man trying to tell the truth plainly.

Wright received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Trent University in 2006 and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2007. He lived in St. Catharines with his wife, Phyllis, and kept writing into his late seventies. He died there on February 7, 2017. His books are full of people remembering, starting over, or trying to make sense of where they ended up, which is probably one reason they still feel so human.