Paul William Roberts (1950 – May 17, 2019) was a Canadian writer who spent many years in Toronto before moving to the Laurentians in Quebec upon losing his vision.
Born in Wales and educated at Exeter College, Oxford, where he gained a second in English Language and Literature, Roberts moved permanently to Canada in 1980. He lived for several years prior to this in India, where he taught at Bangalore University and studied Sanskrit at the Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi.
While working on his first novel, The Palace of Fears, he worked as a television producer at the BBC, and then the CBC and Citytv in Toronto, and was one of the original cohosts of TVOntario's literature talk series Imprint. He covered both the 1991 and 2003 Iraq wars for Harper's, winning numerous awards and accolades, including the 2005 inaugural PEN 'Paul Kidd Award for Courage in Journalism'.
While known to be a friend of Harper's editor Lewis H. Lapham, whom he regards as a mentor, he was believed to be something of a recluse. His non-fiction writing has always received highly enthusiastic reviews, but is difficult to categorize, being more memoir, political critique and history than travelogue.
In 2008 Roberts lost vision in both eyes and was declared legally blind.[1] Roberts had completed an historical novel on Queen Victoria's father, the Duke of Kent and several works of fiction and memoir when he died before publishing. He died on May 17, 2019[2]
