Damian Tarnopolsky is a writer, editor and teacher. His most recent book, a collection of linked stories titled Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster, was published by Freehand Books in September 2024. Robert J. Wiersema described it as “one of the most intriguing, original pieces of fiction you are liable to read this year” (Quill and Quire, starred review).
His previous work, The Defence, won the Voaden Prize, a national playwriting competition, and was presented in a staged reading directed by Craig Walker at the Kingston WritersFest and at the Village Playhouse in Toronto.
Goya’s Dog, a novel about a dyspeptic British painter’s unhappy World War II exile in Toronto, was praised as “very funny and biting” by The Globe and Mail and “a compelling story of an artist at war” by Quill and Quire. It was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Canada/Caribbean) and the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.
His first book, 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 Puritan, The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, subTerrain, Audeamus, and elsewhere, and has twice been nominated for the Journey Prize, as well as the CBC Literary Award. “Like Triumph” was runner-up for the Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence.
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 Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, where he specialized in the later modernist novel and was awarded the President's Teaching Academy award. He published scholarly articles on such subjects as repetition in the works of Samuel Beckett and the unusual ending of Henry Green's novel Loving and has taught writing, communications and literature at the University of Toronto, Humber College, the Junction Writes workshop, and the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies.
From 2016-18 he was the Barbara Moon/Ars Medica Editorial Fellow at Massey College, where he taught creative and reflective writing to medical students and residents. After studying narrative medicine with the Health, Arts and Humanities program at the University of Toronto, he taught at the Centre for Faculty Development at St. Michael’s Hospital and ran “A Rooster for Asclepius,” a health-related writing group. He helped develop and launch the Narrative-Based Medicine Lab at Continuing Professional Development, part of the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto, and now works as the Lab’s Creative Lead as well as teaching in its certificate programs.
Damian Tarnopolsky’s articles and reviews have appeared 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 volunteered as the Managing Editor of the Toronto Review of Books. He is also the proprietor of Slingsby and Dixon, an editorial communications firm in Toronto, where he lives with his family.
