Taras Grescoe

Taras Grescoe (born 1966) is a Canadian non-fiction writer.

His debut book, Sacré Blues, won the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction, and McAuslan First Book Prize.

Grescoe was born in 1966, in Toronto.

From 1990 to 1994, Grescoe taught English in Paris, after which he moved to Montreal and began working as a travel journalist.

He has since contributed to Canadian Geographic, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Smithsonian, National Geographic, Food & Wine, Salon, The New Yorker, The Independent, The Guardian, Salon, National Geographic Traveler, the Times of London, Gourmet, Wired, the Chicago Tribune Magazine, and Condé Nast Traveller.

In addition to the below, Hélène Rioux's translation of Bottomfeeder was shortlisted for The Cole Foundation Prize for Translation in 2010.

His book, Bottomfeeder: how to eat ethically in a world of vanishing seafood has also been published as Dead Seas: how the fish on our plates is killing our planets and Bottomfeeder: how the fish on our plates is killing our planets (Pan/Macmillan 2012).

Since the publication of Straphanger, he has published op-eds, given keynotes, and developed a social media following commenting on urbanism, transit, and active transport.

He has served as juror at the Canada Council for the Arts (publishing) and for the Marian Hebb Research Grant.

Since the beginning of 2023, he has been a professor of Creative Writing, specializing in literary journalism, at Concordia University in Montreal.

He lives in Outremont, Montreal.

In 2022, Grescoe won a Marian Hebb Research Grant, which is intended to support "inquiry and exploration relevant to Canadian publishing, writing and visual arts, and toward the realization of a publishable work in progress.” He is a fellow of the Fondation Michalski in Montricher, Switzerland, where he worked during a six-week residency in the summer of 2022.