Damian Tarnopolsky is a Program Lead in the Narrative-Based Medicine Program at Continuing Professional Development in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto.
His introduction to the field came at Massey College, where as the Barbara Moon/Ars Medica Editorial Fellow he taught creative and reflective writing to medical students and residents. After earning his Narrative Healthcare certificate with the Health, Arts and Humanities program at the University of Toronto, he taught courses in narrative competence at the Centre for Faculty Development at St. Michael’s Hospital, and ran A Rooster for Asclepius, a health-related writing group. He currently teaches in the Narrative-Based Medicine Digital Certificate Program and leads The Mudroom, a creative writing workshop for health practitioners. He is also writer-in-residence with the Health, Arts and Humanities program.
His most recent creative work, The Defence, won the 2019 Voaden Prize, a national playwriting competition, and has been presented as a staged reading by the Kingston WritersFest and in Toronto by Junction Reads. His novel Goya’s Dog, the story of a dyspeptic British painter’s unhappy World War II exile in Toronto, was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book and the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. Lanzmann and Other Stories appeared with Exile Editions and was nominated for the ReLit award. It was praised in the Toronto Star as “at turns surreal, serio-comic, whimsical and erotic,” and by eye weekly for its “authority, Nabokovian play and bawdiness” and “perfect, twisty sentences.” His short fiction has appeared in The Antigonish Review, subTerrain, Audeamus, and elsewhere, and has been twice nominated for the Journey Prize, as well as the CBC Literary Award.
Damian Tarnopolsky studied modern literature at Oxford University and writing at the Humber School for Writers, where he was mentored by Mavis Gallant. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, where he specialized in the later modernist novel and was awarded the President’s Teaching Academy award. His articles and reviews appear in the national press and online in such publications as The Walrus, the Literary Review of Canada, Partisan, and The Globe and Mail, and for a time he was the Managing Editor of the Toronto Review of Books. He is currently the proprietor of Slingsby and Dixon, an editorial communications firm in Toronto, where he lives with his family.