Russell Smith is the author of six works of fiction. A well-known journalist and cultural commentator, he writes the weekly "Virtual Culture" column, on issues of representation, in the national Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail.

Smith was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1963. His father, Rowland Smith, a professor of English, taught at the University of Witwatersrand. His mother, Ann Smith, was a schoolteacher. His sister, Belinda, was born in 1966. The family emigrated to Canada in 1967, and settled in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where his father taught English and African Studies at Dalhousie University.

Russell Smith was educated at the Halifax Grammar School, and then at Queen Elizabeth High School. He studied French literature at the University of Poitiers (France), Queen's University and the University of Paris (III). He obtained an MA in French from Queen's, with a thesis on the poetry of Paul Eluard.

He moved to Toronto in 1989, where he worked as a part-time French teacher and began to publish articles in magazines as a freelancer. His first published article was a reflection on white South African life, in the Idler, in 1989. This began a productive association with the Idler, for whom he wrote many articles on fashion, social life and nightlife. He then published articles on similar themes for Flare, the Globe and Mail, and Toronto, for whom he became a regular restaurant critic. From 1991 to 1995 he wrote restaurant reviews for several journals, including NOW and Toronto Life, and was a restaurant critic for the local CBC radio program Later the Same Day (under the pseudonym Basil Sage).

Since then he has published articles on a variety of subjects in The New York Review of Books, Details, Travel and Leisure, Toronto Life, EnRoute, Toro and others. In 1995, he won the White Award, a U.S. award for magazine writing awarded by the William Allen White School of Journalism in Kansas, for an article in Toronto Life.

For almost two years he wrote a popular weekly column in The Globe and Mail on men's clothing and appearance.

He wrote his first novel, How Insensitive, in 1992, and it was published by the Porcupine's Quill in 1994. A comedy about young people adrift in a fast-moving city, it was reminiscent in its tone of the satires of Kingsley Amis. It was nominated for the Governor General's Award, the Trillium Award, and the Chapters/Books In Canada First Novel Award, and became a best-seller in Canada.

His second novel, Noise, another urban satire, was published by the Porcupine's Quill in 1998. This was translated and published in Germany (as Glamour) by List Verlag in 2000.

His collection of stories, Young Men, was published by Doubleday Canada in 1999. One of the stories in this collection, "Party Going", won the National Magazine Award for Fiction in 1997. Young Men was nominated for the Toronto Book Prize and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award.

His novella, The Princess and the Whiskheads (Doubleday Canada, 2002) is an illustrated fable, an allegory on the role of art in a metropolis, in the style of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales. The illustrations are by engraver Wesley Bates.

Muriella Pent, his most recent novel, is a post-colonial satire about conflicting ideas of art among people from different parts of the former British Empire. It is also set in Toronto.

Smith has also published short fiction and poetry in a variety of journals, including The Queen's Quarterly, Malahat Review, Quarry, New Quarterly, Carousel, Kairos and The Queen Street Quarterly. His story "Fun Girls" was selected for Best Canadian Stories 2003 (Oberon Press).

In 2005 he was a juror for the Governor General's Award in Fiction (in English).

His first non-fiction book, Men's Style: The Thinking Man's Guide to Dress, a practical and philosophical guide to men's clothing, has just been published by McClelland and Stewart in 2005, and will be published in the U.S. by Thomas Dunn Books in 2007.

He is currently the editor of the online men's advisory service, XYYZ.CA.
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