Jon Tattrie is a freelance journalist and writer based in Halifax, Canada. He writes features for Readers Digest, Canadian Geographic, Halifax Magazine, Progress, Atlantic Business Magazine, Atlantic Books Today and others. He is an online and broadcast journalist for CBC and reports for Metro Canada and the Chronicle Herald.
He's a board member of the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia and regularly speaks to universities, colleges, schools, prisons and churches on journalism and writing.
His debut novel, Black Snow, was published by Pottersfield Press in April 2009. His first non-fiction book, The Hermit of Africville, was released in Africville on July 24, 2010. It won the Coast's Best Book 2010 and was a finalist for the Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing.
The day after graduating from Dalhousie University in 1999, Jon got on a plane for Europe, where he spent the next seven years. Mostly based in Edinburgh, Scotland, he travelled across the continent and into Asia and Africa, working in an emergency shelter for homeless men in Ireland, as a shrine-cleaner in a Buddhist monastery in England and as the only vegetarian cook on the Isle of Iona.
He settled on journalism, first on The Edinburgh Evening News, then The Scotsman, both as a reporter and an editor.
In the summer of 2006 he returned to Halifax to take up a position as a copy editor on The Halifax Daily News, where he worked until the paper closed on his birthday in February 2008.
Since then, his freelancing career has seen him sweating in a Mi'kmaq lodge, exploring a nuclear bunker, sailing a tall ship and spending Christmas at the Airport. When he's not writing, he's often kayaking, hiking or teaching the martial art Choi Kwang Do.
He lives in Halifax with his wife.