You are invited to attend an in-person / virutal talk on MAiD and Mental Disorders: How did we get here? on Thursday November 9th, 2023 at 5:30pm. This talk will be presented by Sandra Martin, an award-winning journalist and a contributing writer for The Globe and Mail and the author of the critically acclaimed national bestseller, A Good Death: Making the Most of Our Final Choices.
In-person: Diamond Health Care Centre, Vancouver. DHCC 1020 (lobby level)
Zoom: https://ubc.zoom.us/join
Meeting ID: 917-8725-3544
Passcode: 253544
Sandra Martin, an award-winning journalist and a contributing writer for The Globe and Mail, is the author of the critically acclaimed national bestseller, A Good Death: Making the Most of Our Final Choices. Winner of the B.C. National Non-Fiction Award and a finalist for both the Dafoe Prize and the Donner Prize in Public Policy, A Good Death was named one of the best books of 2016 by The Globe and Mail, the CBC and several other media outlets. Margaret Atwood has called A Good Death “a timely and deeply felt account of assisted dying: the histories, the issues” and included it on her list of best books about death and dying.
A Good Death was published in a revised paperback edition in 2017 with a new chapter on Bill C-14, Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying law (MAID). She has written about her ongoing MAiD research in The Globe and Mail and other publications. Including The Literary Review of Canada. Her essay, Death of an Author: the weirdest man I never met, about MAiD activist John Hofsess was a finalist for a national magazine award in 2023.
She has won two National Magazine Awards, several honourable mentions, the Fiona Mee Award for literary journalism, and a National Newspaper Award nomination for feature writing. As a journalist for The Globe and Mail, she was known for her books and arts coverage and especially for her perceptive, deeply researched and vividly written obituaries. Many of them formed the basis of her essays on the history, culture and future of obituaries in her book, Working the Dead Beat: 50 lives that changed Canada. Long-listed for the Charles Taylor Prize and named a Globe one hundred book for 2012, it was published in paperback under the title Great Canadian Lives: A Cultural History of Modern Canada Through the Art of the Obit.
Her public policy initiatives about race and gender in the workplace won the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy from The Toronto Star. She has also been awarded a Canadian Journalism Fellowship to study at the University of Toronto, named the Pelham Edgar lecturer at Victoria College, and awarded The Harvey Southam Lectureship in Creative non-fiction at the University of Victoria.
As a literary journalist, Martin edited the Oberon Best Short Stories and Coming Attractions anthologies with writer David Helwig, bringing writers such as Rohinton Mistry, Bonnie Burnard and Frances Itani to a wider audience.
As a wide-ranging non-fiction writer, she is the co-author of three books, including Rupert Brooke in Canada and Card Tricks: Bankers, Boomers and the Explosion of Plastic Credit, which was short-listed for the Canadian Business Book Award in 1993. She has written for most magazines (past and present) in this country including Toronto Life, The Walrus, Saturday Night and Queen’s Quarterly.
As a memoirist, she conceived, commissioned and edited The First Man in My Life: Daughters Write About Their Fathers, a best-selling anthology of personal narratives about one of our most complicated and least explored relationships. She also contributed the essay, “Visitation Rights,” to the anthology.
Among other memoir essays, she contributed “Snapshots” to the second volume of Dropped Threads, “Travels in The New South Africa” to Why Are You Telling Me This: Eleven Acts of Intimate Journalism, “Visitation Rights” and “Road Trips” to Great Expectations: Twenty-Four True Stories About Childbirth.
Martin is currently working on a book about aging.
