Will Ferguson has built a career out of chasing the story inside the story, whether it is Canada’s history, its contradictions or its sense of humour about itself. The Calgary author, inducted into the Alberta Order of Excellence in 2024, has published 21 books across genres including the novel, memoir, travelogue and satire, work that has shaped how Canadian and international readers understand the country’s history and identity. Along the way, Alberta and the West have never been sidelined as scenery. They sit at the center of his writing.
A Northern Alberta Childhood Built on Stories
William Stener Ferguson was born October 9, 1964, in Fort Vermilion, a former fur-trading post. His father John taught school and later joined the faculty at Brandon University, while his mother Lorna Bell worked as a psychiatric nurse, then an x-ray technician, before becoming an adult literacy coordinator in northern Alberta. When his parents separated, Lorna raised six children largely on her own, with help from Ferguson’s grandmother Lily Bell. Ferguson has described the household as full of oral storytelling, with the kids competing to make their mother laugh. He planned to study law after high school in Red Deer, enrolling at the University of Alberta in 1983, but chose to join the youth program Katimavik instead, followed by a placement with Canada World Youth that took him to a village in Ecuador.
From Film School to a First Bestseller
Ferguson later earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film Production at York University in 1990, a degree he credits with teaching him the mechanics of writing even after he shifted from filmmaking toward screenwriting. After graduation he taught English in Japan through the JET Program, backpacked across Asia, and met his future wife, Terumi Matsumoto, at a dinner hosted by a mutual Calgary friend. They married in Kumamoto City in 1995 and returned to Canada, settling first in the Maritimes. In 1997, Ferguson sold his first book, Why I Hate Canadians, which went on to sell more than 75,000 copies. That success brought the family back to Alberta, where they settled in Calgary and raised sons Genki and Yuki.
Two Decades of Chronicling Canada
Ferguson has moved easily between history, satire, memoir and mystery, addressing Canadian history directly in books such as Bastards and Boneheads and Canadian History for Dummies, and indirectly through works like Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw and Canadian Pie. His fiction has found international reach too. Generica, later retitled Happiness, sold to publishers in 31 markets, and his 2012 thriller 419 won the Scotiabank Giller Prize before earning the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year. He has written for The New York Times, Esquire UK, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus and Canadian Geographic, penned a long-running column for Maclean’s, and served as head writer for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics closing ceremonies, writing material performed by William Shatner and Michael J. Fox.
Championing Alberta’s Next Writers
Ferguson has also earned the Governor General’s History Award for Popular Media, three Stephen Leacock Medals for Humour, the Northern Lights Award for Travel Writing, the 2021 Book of the Year prize from the Canadian Crime Writers Awards for his novel The Finder, and an honorary degree from Mount Royal University in 2016. Off the page, he mentors emerging authors, visits schools and book clubs, and has served on the board of the Chawkers Foundation, which supports Alberta and western Canadian writers with literary grants. As editor of The Penguin Anthology of Canadian Humour, he made a point of including western voices in a project with national reach. Ferguson has traveled across six continents for his work, from the Australian Outback to the Faroe Islands, but he maintains that Alberta was always the tether that pulled him back home.
Which corner of Alberta’s history do you think still deserves a Will Ferguson book?
