The AUTHOR



Larry Krotz
grew up on a farm in Ontario, north of Stratford. He attended Norwell High School in Palmerston and graduated with a BA in political science from York University’s Glendon College in 1972. As a student, he spent a season as a labourer-teacher for the famed Frontier College where Norman Bethune and Benjamin Spock had worked before him, and also spent a year in Canada’s arctic working with Inuit students in Churchill Manitoba.

Larry moved to Winnipeg in his twenties and became part of the lively writing community there, that included Carol Shields, Jake MacDonald, Dave Williamson, Don Bailey, Patrick Friesen, and Charles Wilkins. His first book was a collaboration with photographer, John Paskievich, Waiting for the Ice Cream Man, writings and photographs from Manitoba prisons published by Converse in 1976.

For several years in the 1980’s, Larry was Manitoba correspondent for The Globe & Mail turning out almost a hundred columns for the Saturday edition of the newspaper. His other journalism appeared in Weekend magazine, Western Living, Quest, the United Church Observer, Canadian Geographic, Saturday Night, Equinox, and Border Crossings. His first solo documentary book, Urban Indians, was published by Hurtig in 1981, followed by a novel, Shutter Speed (Turnstone Press) in 1987.

In the mid 1980’s Larry turned to film and video with work produced for Manitoba’s Department of Education. Later, for Frontier School Division, he traveled across Manitoba’s north producing dozens of videos on community history and other educational topics. He formed Karante Productions in 1987 whose independent films Rising To Dance -about students at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School- and South Indian Lake would later be aired on PBS, CBC, and Bravo.

In 1992 Vision TV sent him to Angola to make a film about the end of that country’s bloody civil war. This was followed by more trips to Kenya, Zimbabwe and Tanzania for more journalism and the 1998 film Searching for Hawa’s Secret for the National Film Board of Canada. Along the way Larry wrote two more books, Indian Country, and Tourists, and taught writing classes at Red River College and the University of Winnipeg.

In 1997, he moved to Toronto to continue a writing career with Saturday Night, the National Post, Walrus, Harrowsmith, and the United Church Observer. In 1999 he edited Frontier College Letters to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the college, and in 2000 published Midlifeman (McClelland & Stewart) and in 2008, The Uncertain Business of Doing Good (University of Manitoba Press).