Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, Robert James Hoshowsky is no stranger to controversy. As a child, he wrote and illustrated 30 to 50-page-long stories; unfortunately, he usually did this during class, when he should have been listening to his teachers.
His love of writing and illustration soon found Robert winning contests and being published in newspapers and magazines in his early teens. A skilled illustrator with a highly detailed and exacting style reminiscent of engravings and etchings by Rembrandt and Albrecht Dürer, Robert was executing paid commissions while still in high school. Poised for a career as an art teacher, Robert changed career plans after writing and editing a local paper, which saw him tackling subjects ranging from the Deschênes Commission and the hunt for war criminals to Polish hunger strikers struggling to remain in Canada.
A graduate of Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University), Robert has traveled extensively throughout Europe, and dispatched articles from the former Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Belgium and other countries. His extensive body of work covers newspapers, magazines, electronic media and television. His articles have appeared in Canadian and international publications, including Maclean’s magazine, the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, Equinox, Homemaker’s, Menz, Shift, Film Score Monthly, Silver Kris, the Gazette (Montreal), La Presse, and Performing Arts & Entertainment in Canada. For many years, he wrote dozens of business profiles for the Toronto Star’s special sections.
Robert has interviewed many well-known personalities, including directors Roman Polanski and Roland Joffé, actress Julie Andrews, actor Michael Caine, composers John Barry, Quincy Jones, R. Murray Schafer, and Canada’s own Nash the Slash. His television credits include the Canadian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and TimeChase for the History Channel, and his educational new media works includes creating over a dozen book-length CD-ROMs for adults and children on Tai Chi, Sports Rules, Reptiles, Wild Cats, Secrets of the Internet, and Hollywood on the Net.
Robert is a highly-skilled writer and researcher who used his abilities, persistence and incessant nagging to uncover previously hidden materials from the Canadian government and the Federal Bureau of Investigation - to name a few - for his first book, The Last to Die: Ronald Turpin, Arthur Lucas, and the End of Capital Punishment in Canada.
His proudest accomplishment came when he wrote a story for the Toronto Star about a seven-year-old girl desperate for a heart transplant. The parents of a little girl who just died read the story, and decided to donate their child’s heart to save the life of another, turning their personal tragedy into triumph.