Greg Gatenby is the founding Artistic Director of the annual and world-renowned International Festival of Authors in Toronto, and of its adjunct, the weekly Harbourfront Reading Series. Under the nearly thirty years of his leadership, the program featured readings, panels, roundtables, and talks by more than 4,000 distinguished authors—including 21 Nobel laureates (19 of whom were featured before they had won the Nobel)—from more than 90 nations--attracting crowds, on many evenings, measured in the thousands. His programming—and Greg Gatenby himself— have received major profiles in the world's leading periodicals. Time Magazine, for example, declared that he had, more than anyone else in the city, made Toronto one of the literary capitals of the world. The program and his directorship have also received singular praise from Newsweek, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, Le Monde, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Asahi Shinbun, Corriere della Sera, and El Pais among many others—and the Los Angeles Times described the festival he created as the "Olympics of world literature." Margaret Atwood has stated “Greg set the model for all the other festivals." British novelist Ian McEwan said “I think he changed the nature of readings in North America and in Britain. Back in the ’70s it was always this incredibly solemn, churchy feel to a reading. Now they’re much more kind of relaxed and pleasant and there’s more of a level interchange between writers and readers. [Toronto] was the only place you came where there was a bit of pizzazz, sophistication, a sense that a reading was not a church group, more like a jazz club.” One of the highlights of his career as an impresario was organizing and hosting, in October 2000, the largest, paid-admission literary event in the history of the world—a reading from Harry Potter by author J.K. Rowling. More than 20,000 people, mostly children, packed the SkyDome in Toronto to hear her read and speak. As a result of his pre-eminence as an arts executive, Greg Gatenby has been a consultant to other festivals in London, England; Berlin, Germany; Sydney, Australia; Adelaide, Australia; Wellington, New Zealand; Calgary, Alberta; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Dublin, Ireland; Rotterdam, Netherlands; Taipei, Taiwan; and Lahti, Finland, among others. This global perspective on the literary arts was reflected in the fact that the IFOA, under his direction, was the only international gathering of authors which, each year, made a point of featuring writers from all six continents--to remind the media and the public that fine writing is published all over the planet and not just in the traditional cultural centres. In 1990, at the request of civic leader William Kilbourn, Gatenby sat on the founding Board of Advisors for the Toronto Word-on-the-Street Book Festival, a one-day, annual event now attracting over 150,000 people. Gatenby was a fulltime member of the Toronto committee (headed by Peter Ustinov) which formed and presented the cultural component of the Toronto bid for the 1996 Olympic Games. He was also the lead arts-member of the Toronto bid for the 2008 Olympic Games--posts which brought him into constant contact over several years with all of the major arts organizations and players in the city. Among his recent activities, he was the literary advisor to the Artistic Director of the 2015 Pan-Am Games in Toronto, and is an ongoing advisor to the Director of the annual Berlin Literaturfestival. In 1989 Greg Gatenby was given the City of Toronto Literary Award, an honour conferred each year upon a person who has made an outstanding contribution to Toronto letters through his writing and his work on behalf of other writers. The previous winners of the Prize were Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje. In 1991 he was made an Honorary Lifetime Member of the League of Canadian Poets, and received a similar honour from the Writers’ Union of Canada in 2013. His experience within academia is substantial. For example, in 1992 he founded and ran for its first two years The School of Creative Writing at Humber College (one of the leading community colleges in Canada) bringing as faculty such eminent authors as Margaret Atwood, Richard Ford, D.M. Thomas, Ann Beattie, Caryl Phillips, Jane Urquhart, Peter Carey, Dionne Brand and many distinguished others. More recently, Gatenby was made a Visiting Scholar at Massey College, University of Toronto, a rare honour conferred by the University only on those who are internationally distinguished in their fields and considered ideal for mentoring graduate students. The Fellows meet regularly at the College with its grad students who hail from around the world. Gatenby has also given readings from his own work—and has given over one hundred lectures about Canadian culture and history—at major universities and cultural centres in most of the European nations, as well as in the USA, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, China, and Taiwan. For two years, as well, he taught English Literature part-time at a Toronto community college. In the year 2000 he was named to the Order of Canada, the highest honour that can be conferred on civilians in his native land. To date, he remains the youngest person from the world of letters to have been so honoured at the time of induction. In addition to his work with literature and its creators, Gatenby has broad experience collaborating with scores of the world’s finest visual artists. He successfully worked with several of the planet’s most famous painters and sculptors to create original images for his books on whales and dolphins. Among the artists with whom he has worked are Kenneth Armitage, Richard Artschwager, David Blackwood, Terry Frost, Friedrensreich Hundertwasser, Colin Lanceley, Ronnie Landfield, Roberto Matta, James McGarrell, Jacques Monory, Peter Phillips, Richard Pousette-Dart, Jesus Soto, Curt Stenvert, and Paul Wunderlich. He then worked closely with some of these artists and others (such as Enzo Cucchi, Michael Snow, and Beverly Pepper) in the creation of the poster for the annual International Festival of Authors. Of necessity Gatenby has had to be a very successful fundraiser, and, in his years at the helm of the Harbourfront literary programs (where he was responsible for raising and overseeing an annual budget of seven-figures), he worked closely with the CEOs of some of the country’s leading corporations, either to arrange outright donations or to meld their corporate marketing needs with the fiscal demands of his arts programming. Likewise, he has considerable and comfortable experience working with politicians of all parties and all levels of government--frequently up to and including Prime Ministers and foreign heads of state. Since the late 1970s, Greg Gatenby has been an outspoken advocate for the rights of authors, and for freedom of expression. He was one of the five founding members of the reconstituted PEN Canadian Centre, and one of the four principal organizers of the PEN World Congress in Toronto in 1989. He also served on the reconstituted board of the Writers Development Trust, helping that organization find its feet and re-establish itself as one of the leading literary organizations in the country. For two years in the early 1990s he hosted a television book-show for TV-Ontario, and for some years was the chief book reviewer on the flagship national arts program of CBC Radio. In 2002 he also hosted a program called "Authors at Harbourfront" for the national Book-TV Network. Gatenby has published volumes of poetry, but is undoubtedly better known as an author for a) his two, internationally-celebrated books about dolphins and whales in art, music and literature, b) his further two books examining how foreign writers have written about Canada, and c) for his encyclopaedic Toronto: A Literary Guide, this latter essentially a six-hundred page literary history of his home town, a book which took twenty years to research and write. Rhombus Media, the Oscar-nominated film company, made a one-hour documentary based on his Whales: A Celebration.