Contributor Profiles

Freelance journalist, award-winning author and former business executive James Osborne has written two novels, as well as more than 150 articles and short stories. 

Several of his short stories, winners of national and international awards, have been published in anthologies, including Tales2Inspire: The Emerald Collection, a popular seller on Amazon.com, and Words on The Lake 2013, a 10th anniversary anthology published by the Shuswap Association of Writers.

Osborne's journalism career includes reporting from Parliament Hill and three provincial legislatures. He began as a reporter for newspapers, and later for The Canadian Press in Ottawa and Edmonton, where he became a senior editor. His journalism career took him to many parts of North America, including Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, and most of Canada's provinces.

He taught journalism, communications planning and public relations, and was the founding director of the journalism program at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton. Osborne was also involved in founding the journalism program at the University of Regina, where he served on that school's advisory board alongside a number of prominent journalists including Lloyd Robertson and Knowlton Nash. 

He has guest lectured on journalism and communications at several post-secondary institutions, including University of Regina, Mount Royal University in Calgary, Humber College in Toronto and Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax.

First love beckons

Osborne, who graduated in political science from the University of Alberta and studied business management at Duke University in Durham, N.C., left journalism for several years, eventually serving as a vice-president of public affairs for SaskTel in Regina and later for Bell Canada in Toronto. He was president of his own business from 1993 to 2003 in Calgary, advising private and publicly-traded companies on strategic and operational planning, and investor relations.

After semi-retiring in 2003, Osborne returned to his first love, writing.  His articles and short stories have been published in magazines, newspapers, textbooks, professional journals in Canada and the U.S., as well as being posted on numerous websites and blogs. Samples of his short stories can be found on his personal blog: JamesOsborneNovels.com.

Osborne recalls that his earliest interest in literature came soon after learning to read, although literary material was limited at that time on his family's farm in the Alberta wilderness west of Edmonton. He did have access to a large, single-volume version of Encyclopaedia Britannica and an expanded Webster's Dictionary, both of which he read one long, cold winter.