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WordFest: Banff-Calgary International Writers Festival
Banff Centre
Tuesday, October 14 - Sunday, October 19

More in: Literary

Bestselling and award-winning Canadian writer Ronald Wright’s newest book — What is America? A Short History of the New World Order — argues that colonization and modernization made America a world leader, but its excesses are now destroying the country and taking the global system down with it. Working in both fiction and non-fiction. His books include A Short History of Progress, based on his 2004 CBC Massey Lectures, A Scientific Romance and Henderson’s Spear.

What is America takes us through the discovery of the New World and first European contact, which, as in Wright’s past work, is written with admiration for indigenous peoples. He says in an e-mail interview that his perspective comes from “the realization that the ‘history’ I’d absorbed — shaped by their conquerors and dispossessors — was self-serving bunk.’’

Wright says he uses “words — primary writings and speeches — wherever these have survived in reliable form, from the eyewitnesses of past events,” as the starting point in all of his research. From these he discerns patterns in his latest work, as the New World becomes the modern world. He focuses on instances of conquest and greed detailed in early histories and modern examples of American overindulgence.

In the book Wright highlights the folly of lapsed memory. “The tragedy of American diplomacy since 1918 has been that the United States did learn the hard lessons of world history in the first half of the 20th century and then forgot them in the second.”

Not all have forgotten, however, and Wright looks with a reserved hope at the European Union as a model, which he writes “has grown away from tribalism, fanaticism and militarism, and towards a new commonwealth built not on the threat of war but on its memory.”

Born in England of an English mother and a Canadian father, Wright came to the University of Calgary as a PhD student after studying archaeology at Cambridge. “Calgary was a better place to study New World civilization,” he says, “mainly because it had one of the world’s top Mayanists, David Kelley, on faculty.”

However, a doctorate was not in Wright’s future. “I had wanted to write since my early teens, and learned during my 20s that I was more of a generalist than a specialist,” he says. This broad outlook led to his career as a traveller and bi-talented writer. “Fiction and non-fiction interest me equally,” he says. “I think of my first novel, A Scientific Romance, and my Massey Lectures, A Short History of Progress, as twin books, two ways to tell the same story.”

Wright has three bestselling non-fiction books: Time among the Maya, Stolen Continents and the aforementioned A Short History of Progress — which also won the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award for non-fiction book of the year and has been published in more than a dozen languages.

Not bad for someone who shunned academia and the prestige bestowed on those with a title. However, for Wright, it’s about not being tied down. “My school days taught me that the world is run by fools and knaves. So I set out to be free to run my own life. Writing has been a way of doing that. No doubt I am sometimes a fool and knave, too, but at least I answer only to myself.”