Rick Salutin

Salutin, Rick

Rick Salutin, playwright and journalist (b at Toronto 30 Aug 1942). After studying at Brandeis University, Columbia University and New York's New School for Social Research, Salutin returned to Toronto in 1970 to work as a trade-union organizer. He found effective outlets for his strong nationalist and socialist views through his writing.

After his first play, Fanshen (1971), he began collaborating with Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille in the techniques of collective creation, calling himself "the writer on, but not of"1837: The Farmers' Revolt (1973), a vivid popularization of Canadian history which won the Chalmers Outstanding Play Award.

Salutin pursued his political analysis of Canadian history in other collective plays such as I.W.A. (1976) with Newfoundland's Mummers Troupe, and in his own play Les Canadiens (1977), an account of nationalism and hockey in Québec, which won a second Chalmers.

Salutin is also the author of two essay collections, Marginal Notes (1984) and Living In a Dark Age (1991) and two novels, A Man of Little Faith and The Age of Improv (1994), the last a futuristic novel of Canadian politics. As playwright, journalist (winner of the National Newspaper Award for his Globe and Mail column in 1993), editor and scriptwriter for TV docudramas, Salutin remains an important interpreter of Canada's social and political development.