Giller Prize & Gemini Award Winning Journalist and Author, Former Co-Host of CBC's Fifth Estate and The Journal
Linden MacIntyre is best known as the award-winning former host of Canada’s premiere investigative television show, CBC’sthe fifth estate, as well as an internationally bestselling novelist. Speaking on topics ranging from mass media and democracy to justice and public policy, MacIntyre brings provocative points and impeccable analysis to every stage he graces.
MacIntyre was the host of the fifth estate for 24 years, ending his tenure in 2014. His work for the program garnered him an International Emmy, ten Gemini Awards, and the Gordon Sinclair Award for Best Overall Broadcast Journalist and Best Anchor or Interviewer.
His journalism career began in 1964 with The Halifax Chronicle-Herald as a parliamentary bureau reporter. He was also an Ottawa reporter for The Financial Times of Canada, and in 1976, he joined CBC Television Halifax as a current affairs story editor and journalist for Here Today. He soon hosted his own program, The MacIntyre File, which began in 1977 and ran for three seasons. He later worked at The Journal and hosted CBC Radio’s Sunday Morning before joining the fifth estate.
A documentary filmmaker, MacIntyre’s film Power and Profit won him ACTRA’s Gordon Sinclair Award for Outspoken Opinions and Integrity, while in 2003, he produced (with Neil Docherty) A Toxic Company in partnership with PBS Frontline and The New York Times Television. The documentary won many prestigious awards, including the Dupont/Columbia Silver Baton, the George Polk Award, the George Foster Peabody Award and the CBC’s Wilderness award. The accompanying New York Times series of articles won a Pulitzer Prize.
As a writer, MacIntyre’s bestselling first novel, The Long Stretch, was nominated for a CBA Libris Award and his boyhood memoir, Causeway: A Passage from Innocence, won both the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Nonfiction and the Evelyn Richardson Prize. His second novel, The Bishop’s Man, was a #1 national bestseller, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Dartmouth Book Award and the CBA Libris Fiction Book of the Year Award, among other honours. The third book in the loose-knit trilogy, Why Men Lie, was also a #1 national bestseller as well as a Globe and Mail“Can’t Miss” Book for 2012. In 2017 he published a novel, The Only Cafe, a drama set in the Lebanese civil war (which he covered as a journalist). In 2019, he published a non fiction book, The Wake: the deadly legacy of a Newfoundland tsunami (which devastated the south coast of Newfoundland including the community in which he was later born). In 2021 he published a novel, The Winter Wives, about two friends married to sisters, both men infatuated with the same woman. He is currently working on a non-fiction story set in the Irish War of Independence, 1920 – 1922.
MacIntyre was born in St. Lawrence, Nfld., and grew up in Port Hastings, Cape Breton, N.S.
