Wisdom of the Ages

WILL FERGUSON, 53, is an award-winning travel writer and novelist whose work has been published in 23 languages around the world. A three-time winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour, his novel 419 won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He is a past recipient of the Pierre Berton Award from Canada’s National History Society and, in 2016, he received an honorary degree in English from Mount Royal University. His latest novel, The Shoe on the Roof, is the surprising story of a psychological experiment gone wrong. “The idea came from my mom, Lorna Bell,” he explains. “She worked as a psychiatric nurse at the Weyburn Mental Hospital in Saskatchewan in the 1950s under Dr. Humphry Osmond, a renowned but controversial psychiatrist. He helped humanize the treatment of mental patients. The stories she told were at once harrowing, heartbreaking, unsettling and inspirational.”