Mark MacKinnon is The Globe and Mail’s Senior International Correspondent. He has been internationally recognized for his coverage of the war in Syria, the rise of the so-called Islamic State, and the refugee crisis that followed. He was named Journalist of the Year at 2016 National Newspaper Awards for his 16,000-word story The Graffiti Kids, which followed the lives of the teenagers who inadvertently started the war in Syria. His story “The Fearless” on the Ukrainian special forces team that rescued The Globe and Mail’s translators from Afghanistan—and the war they’ve fought since returning home to Ukraine—won the award for 2024 Story of the Year from the London-based Foreign Press Association. That feature is part of his comprehensive, human-driven reporting on the Russian war on Ukraine nominated for the 2025 National Newspaper Award in International Reporting. THe is the author of The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics, The China Diaries, an e-book of his train travels through the Middle Kingdom along with photographer John Lehmann. His essay, A view on the world, is included in A Nation’s Paper: The Glove and Mail in the Life of Canada, edited by John Ibbitson. In 2027, Penguin Random House will publish Fearless: At War with Ukraine’s Elite Special Forces. MacKinnon divides his time between London and Kyiv.
Website: Mark MacKinnon/The Globe and Mail
From Canada’s newspaper of record for 180 years, here are 30 brilliant and provocative essays by a diverse selection of their writers on how The Globe and Mail covered and influenced major events and issues from the paper’s founding to the latest news.
Since 1844, The Globe and Mail and its predecessor, George Brown’s Globe, have chronicled Canada: as a colony, a dominion, and a nation. To mark the paper’s 180th anniversary, Globe writers explored thirty issues and events in which the national newspaper has steered the course of the country: Confederation, settler migrations, regional tensions, tussles over language, religion, and race. The essays reveal a tapestry of progress, conflict, and still-incomplete reconciliation: Catholic-Protestant hostilities that are now mostly the stuff of memory; the betrayal of Indigenous peoples with which the newspaper—and the country—still grapples; the frustrations and triumphs of women journalists; pandemics then and now; environmental challenges; the joys of covering sports and the arts; the highs and lows of chronicling the nation’s business and world affairs; the impossibility of Canada and of this newspaper, which both somehow flourish nonetheless.
Riveting, insightful, troubling, witty, and with black-and-white photographs throughout (plus a full-colour photographic essay), A Nation’s Paper examines a country and a newspaper that have grown and struggled together—essential reading for anyone who wants to understand where we came from and where we are going.
The Globe and Mail will donate all its proceeds from the book to Journalists for Human Rights.
At this crucial time for journalism, facts, and public trust in media, Wordfest and the Canadian Association of Journalists are proud to present a conversation with Mark MacKinnon, Senior International correspondent for The Globe and Mail, who has been covering international affairs and Canada’s role in the world since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. One of Canada’s most decorated foreign correspondents, MacKinnon has won the National Newspaper Award seven times. He was nominated in 2022 and again this year for his ongoing coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This vital afternoon conversation, hosted by journalist Christina Frangou, includes an audience Q&A and book signing.
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
