About Lionel Lumb

Lionel Lumb was born in Lahore, then British India, in 1937. A few years after 1947’s Independence and Partition, the Lumb family moved to Calcutta (now Kolkata) where he started publishing short stories as a teenager. He began a lengthy career in journalism at The Statesman newspaper in 1956. A bigger move came in 1963, when the family emigrated to Britain, and he fulfilled an early ambition to work on Fleet Street, London, joining Reuters as a desk editor and writer. But he didn’t quite escape the lure of newspapers and spent two years with The Scotsman in Edinburgh from 1966–68. Then came the Vietnam war and its great visual impact on the daily broadcasts swept him into television news with the BBC in 1968. He had found his dream job, and he threw himself into it with a passion for visual story-telling that lasted for decades. In 1973, the family moved to Canada for a joyous, invigorating life, first in Toronto and then a long spell in Ottawa. Lionel has worked as a producer or executive producer of various programs on the CBC, CTV and Global. The CBC also used him as a journalism trainer and that experience, combined with a fellowship at Duke University, guided him into ending his career as an associate professor of journalism at Carleton University, Ottawa. He taught mostly broadcast journalism there, retiring officially in 2003 but continuing to teach some current affairs or documentary courses until 2012. After that, he broke free of the seductive spell of television and returned to his first love of writing fiction. He has also edited two anthologies of fiction and essays. He and his wife, Shirley, moved back to Toronto in 2019.