Finkle, Derek '86

A graduate of Princeton University, Finkle won the Francis LeMoyne Page Award in 1990 for his creative thesis. While pursuing his MA at the University of Toronto, he began publishing in a variety of magazines and journals in the early 1990s. He was Toronto Life magazine’s first editorial intern in 1993, which resulted in his first cover story, “The Sting,” which was optioned for film. Finkle was a regular contributor to Saturday Night magazine, The Globe and Mail before publishing his first book, No Claim to Mercy, an examination of the controversial Robert Baltovich murder case. No Claim to Mercy won 1999 Crime Writers’ Arthur Ellis Award for Best Non-Fiction and the prominent American writer Joyce Carol Oates called it: “A model of investigative journalism, ambitiously and carefully researched, and in its conclusions, original and provocative.” From 2002 to 2007, he was the editor of Toro magazine, which garnered more than sixty National Magazine Awards, including his own for investigative reporting in 2005. In 2009, Finkle founded the Canadian Writers Group (CWG), a unique agency that represents about 90 of Canada’s top independent writers.