Richard Gwyn

Richard John Philip Jermy Gwyn (May 26, 1934 – August 15, 2020) was a British and Canadian journalist, author, historian, and civil servant.

Early life Richard Gwyn was born on May 26, 1934, in Bury St. Edmunds, England. He was the second son to Brigadier Philip Eustace Congreve Jermy Gwyn, an Indian Army officer, and Elizabeth Edith Jermy Gwyn (née Tilley), the eldest daughter of Sir John Anthony Cecil Tilley. His older brother died in infancy.

At the age of 20, in 1954, he emigrated to Canada.

As an author, he is best known for his 1980 contemporary biography of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, The Northern Magus, and for a two-volume historical biography of Sir John A. Macdonald. The first volume of his Macdonald biography, The Man Who Made Us, won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction in 2008. The second volume, Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times; Volume Two: 1867-1891, won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing in 2012 and was a finalist for the Governor General's Award for English-language non-fiction and the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

From 1983 to 1987 he and Robert Fulford co-hosted the long-form interview show Realities on TVOntario. Gwyn also appeared weekly as a panellist from 1994 to 2006 on TVO's Studio 2 and Diplomatic Immunity and was an occasional guest on The Agenda until 2017.

Personal and later life Four years after emigrating to Canada, Gwyn married Sandra Gwyn in 1958. Their marriage lasted till her death on May 26, 2000, due to breast cancer. Gwyn subsequently remarried to Carol Bishop-Gwyn, and after residing in the Cabbagetown neighbourhood of Toronto, he moved with his wife into a condominium in the Lawrence Park neighbourhood.

On November 29, 2001, Gwyn was appointed chancellor of St. Jerome's University at the University of Waterloo and was installed on March 17, 2002. The same year, he became an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Gwyn ceased writing his column in 2016 and made his last appearance as a television panellist in 2017. He had been living with Alzheimer's disease for several years and resided at Dunfield Retirement Residence, an assisted living facility in midtown Toronto. He died from Alzheimer's on August 15, 2020.

Major works The Shape of Scandal: A Study of a Government in Crisis. 1965. Smallwood, The Unlikely Revolutionary. 1965. The Northern Magus: Pierre Trudeau and Canadians, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1980. The 49th Paradox: Canada in North America. 1985. Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian. 1995. John A.: The Man Who Made Us. 2007.