2002 Presenter Full Presenter List

David Rakoff

Humourist

He survived Hodgkin’s disease, studied at a Buddhist retreat led by Steven Seagal, and spent a Christmas season impersonating Sigmund Freud in the window of Barney’s department store in Manhattan.

All appropriate fodder for a writer with the dry wit of David Rakoff. For the most part, personal experiences serve as the content for Rakoff’s work, whether it’s for Fraud, his first book of essays released in 2001, or for the plethora of other articles Rakoff has written. He is a correspondent for Outside magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine as well as to Public Radio International’s This American Life, which boasts a million American listeners each week. Rakoff’s writing has also appeared in GQ, Wired, Harper’s Bazaar, Salon.com and The New York Observer, among others.

Rakoff was born in Montreal, raised in Toronto and moved to New York when he was 18-years-old. Some twenty years later, according to CBC Radio’s program This Morning: Sunday Edition, Rakoff describes himself “….as a ‘New York Writer’ who also happens to be a Canadian, Jewish, gay and an ‘East Asian Studies Major Who Has Forgotten Most of his Japanese’”.