An acclaimed novelist, historian, broadcaster and essayist.

Born in England, educated at Cambridge and at the University of Calgary, Ronald Wright is an award-winning writer in a wide range of fields and one of Canada's foremost public intellectuals.

In 2004 Ronald Wright was chosen to deliver Canada's prestigious CBC Massey Lectures. The accompanying book, A Short History of Progress, was a number-one Canadian bestseller, and has been published worldwide in more than a dozen languages. A feature documentary film is currently in production.

Each time history repeats itself, says Wright in A Short History of Progress, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human numbers, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water - the very elements of life. The great question of the twenty-first century is how, or whether, this can go on.

Wright explains how our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we unleashed but have seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of progress and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.

In his follow-up bestseller, What is America? A Short History of the New World Order, Wright peels away historical myths to reveal the impact of the Americas on the world since Columbus and the rise of a small colonial outpost to the rank of the world's only superpower. He asks why America's great achievements - in democracy, prosperity and civil rights - are so often at risk from sinister forces within itself, arguing that the United States has always been a deeply divided society, a polarity highlighted in the 2008 presidential election.

A novelist, historian and essayist, Wright has won prizes in all three genres and is published in more than a dozen languages. His nonfiction includes the number one bestsellers Time Among the Maya and Stolen Continents, winner of the Gordon Montador Award and chosen as a book of the year by the Independent and the Sunday Times. His 2004 Massey Lectures, A Short History of Progress, became a major international bestseller and won the CBA Libris Award for Non-Fiction Book of the Year. His latest book, What is America?, instantly became number-one Canadian bestseller.

Wright's first novel, A Scientific Romance, won Britain's David Higham Prize for Fiction in 1997 and was chosen a book of the year by the Globe and Mail, the Sunday Times, and the New York Times. He is also a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and has written and presented documentaries for radio and television on both sides of the Atlantic.

A popular commentator and speaker, Wright explains how even though our society may already be in crisis, the right choices can still be made. His talks concerning the United States provide a much needed and fresh perspective on the future of the world's most powerful nation.

• The Traps of Progress
• What is Amercia?
• The New World Order
• Imagining the Best and Worst, from Utopia to George Orwell

"Magic… Ronald Wright is one of Canada's most seasoned and eloquent travellers."
- Maclean's

"A ripping yarn packed with head-turning ideas… [Wright] artfully uses the archelogy of the future to satiric ends… A Scientific Romance is a feast of a read, succeeding both as entertainment and a provocative parable of environmental limits."
- NOW

"Henderson's Spear serves history and fiction with equal aplomb, and they are blended as finely as one could wish. This is a thought-provoking and well-wrought novel whose characters and situations lodge in the mind."
- Los Angeles Times

[What is America? is]… an elegant and learned discussion of what the rise and fall of past civilizations predict about our own."
- Maclean's

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