Teacher, historian, peregrino. Nick Mount is an internationally recognized Canadian scholar with two books behind him, one that won the major prize in its field and another that was a national best book of the year. He has written for magazines and newspapers, and his lectures have a substantial YouTube audience. As a writer and a speaker, Nick’s strength is the ability to synthesize research into narratives that can hold the attention of 500 first-year students and educate and entertain the general reader. He is an experienced cultural historian, a scholar whose skill and passion is translating specialist knowledge for wide audiences.

‍He is a full professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto’s central campus, where he has taught since completing his PhD at Dalhousie University in 2001. He has taught a wide range of courses on literature and cultural history to thousands of undergraduate and graduate students, including for many years the department’s largest course, “Literature for Our Time.” In 2011, he won a 3M National Teaching Fellowship, the country’s highest teaching award.‍‍‍

Mount’s first book was When Canadian Literature Moved to New York (University of Toronto, 2005), the first history of a massive literary exodus from Canada at the end of the nineteenth century. Hailed as “meticulously researched and engagingly written,” “enlivened by wit,” “an ideal guide to this little-known material,” When Canadian Literature Moved to New York won the Gabrielle Roy Prize for the best book of the year in Canadian literary criticism.

His second book was published in 2017 by the House of Anansi in Canada and the United States. Arrival: The Story of CanLit tells the story of the explosion of Canadian writing in the 1960s that produced dozens of internationally known writers, including Canada’s first Nobel Laureate, Alice Munro. Arrival was a national bestseller, a Globe and Mail and National Post best book of the year, widely reviewed and discussed, called “Kaleidoscopic, exuberant, ferociously well-informed”…“The most important book to be written in more than forty years about the rise of Canadian literature.”

He has published reviews, essays, and articles in scholarly journals and popular magazines on a range of subjects, including Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the censorship of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the pop star Lana Del Rey, the street artist Banksy, and an essay on the return of beauty to contemporary visual art that won a National Magazine Award. He gives public talks on the arts for literary clubs, libraries, and art galleries and is regularly sought out for interviews on Canadian radio and television. He was the fiction editor of Canada’s largest general-interest trade magazine, The Walrus, for five years and the head judge of the Amazon Canada First Novel Award for two years. In 2016, Mount selected and edited the fiction and art for a special Canadian issue of the Italian magazine Internazionale. In summer 2023 he delivered a lecture series for Harbin Institute of Technology in China, including a final lecture drawn from his current research on destruction.