McCall, Christina 1935–2005

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born January 29, 1935, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; died of cancer April 27, 2005, in Providence, RI. Journalist and author. McCall was a prominent political journalist who later wrote award-winning books about the Canadian Liberal Party and former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. McCall originally planned to be a theater critic, but after graduating from the University of Toronto in 1956, she instead joined the editorial staff of Maclean's. McCall was assigned secretarial-level work at first, but her writing skills were soon recognized and she began gaining important reporting assignments. In 1958 McCall went to work for Chatelaine magazine as a freelancer and broadcaster in the mid-1960s, and she was hired as Ottawa editor for Saturday Night magazine in 1967. That same year, her first book, The Man from Oxbow, was published. McCall returned to Maclean's as an associate editor during the early 1970s, was the national reporter for the Toronto Globe and Mail from 1974 to 1976, and then accepted the position of executive editor at Saturday Night in 1976. Working as a contributing editor for the magazine in 1980, she focused on writing her next book, Grits: An Intimate Portrait of the Liberal Party(1982). The book was critically acclaimed, winning the Book of the Year award from the Canadian Authors' Association and a nomination for the Governor General's Award for nonfiction. After Trudeau retired from office, McCall collaborated with her husband to publish a definitive, two-volume biography: Trudeau and Our Times (1990, 1994). The first volume won the Governor General's Award and the second was presented with the John Dafoe Prize for Distinguished Writing.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Canadian Press, April 28, 2005.

National Post (Canada), April 30, 2005, p. A4.

Ottawa Citizen, April 29, 2004, p. A4.

Toronto Star, April 28, 2005, p. A18.

ONLINE

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Web site, http://www.cbc.ca/ (April 28, 2005).