Russell Smith is a novelist and cultural commentator. He was born in South Africa and grew up in Halifax, Canada. He studied French literature at Queen’s University, the Université de Poitiers and the Université de Paris (III). He has an MA from Queen’s.
He has lived in Toronto since 1989, where he has made a living primarily as a freelance journalist. He has published articles in the New York Review of Books, Details, Chatelaine, Toronto Life, Flare, Now, EnRoute and other journals. He won the William Allen White Award, in the United States, for magazine writing in 1995.
Smith writes two weekly columns for The Globe and Mail: one in the Review section, on culture and the arts, and the other in the Style section, an advice column for men. He was the host and co-writer of the popular CBC radio program on language, And Sometimes Y, for two seasons. He is one of the founders of an online men's magazine, DailyXY, a daily lifestyle advice sheet.DailyXY won two gold medals, including best all-around site, at the Canadian Online Magazine Awards in 2009.
He is the author of eight books, seven of them fiction. They are mostly set in Toronto and concern the lives of downtown people. His early novels, How Insensitive (1994) and Noise (1998), are satirical and comic portrayals of big-city life and the sexual mores of young people. How Insensitive was nominated for the Governor General’s Award. Noise was published in German as Glamour by List Verlag. His book of short stories, Young Men, followed in 1999. The opening story in that collection, "Party Going", won the Canadian National Magazine Award for fiction in 1997. He then published an illustrated fantasy novella, The Princess and the Whiskheads. His pornographic novel, Diana: A Diary in the Second Person(2003), was published by Gutter Press under the pseudonym Diane Savage. The novel was republished, under his own name, with a new introduction, by Biblioasis in 2008.
His 2004 novel Muriella Pent was shortlisted for the Rogers Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Impac Dublin Award, and named as Best Fiction of 2004 by Amazon.ca.
Smith's non-fiction book is Men's Style: The Thinking Man's Guide To Dress (2005). It was based on the regular column on men's fashion he writes for the Globe and Mail.
In 2005 he was a juror for the Governor General's Award in Fiction (in English).
His most recent novel, Girl Crazy (HarperCollins Canada), a darker work with thriller elements, was called “hot, steamy, ruthlessly lucid” by Barbara Gowdy and “chatty, funny, sex-loving” by David Gilmour. The Globe and Mailcalled it “daring and well-executed” and Quill and Quire called it “a story of scathing insight.” He is now adapting it for the screen for New Real Films of Toronto.
Smith currently teaches creative writing in the MFA program at the University of Guelph. He lives in Toronto with his partner, Jowita Bydlowska, a writer and photographer, and their son, Hugo.