biography
ALLAN LEVINE is an award-winning internationally selling author and historian based in Winnipeg, Canada.
He has written sixteen books including Toronto: Seeking the Fabled City: The Canadian Jewish Experience (2018), Toronto: Biography of City (2014) and King: William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Life Guided by the Hand of Destiny (2011), which won the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction.
His book, Coming of Age: A History of the Jewish People of Manitoba (2009) won the McNally-Robinson Book of the Year and the Best History Book Award at the Canadian Jewish Book Awards in 2010, and was the co-winner of the J.I. Segal Prize in Canadian Jewish History.
With a Ph.D. in history from the University of Toronto (1985), Allan has spent his career bringing history to life and commenting on current events. Inspired long ago by Canadian author Peter C. Newman, who he has collaborated with on several projects. Allan is at heart a passionate story-teller. The reviews of his books by both professionals and average readers bears this out: He writes books that are hard to put down once they are started.
In 1994, in a review of Scrum Wars: The Prime Ministers and the Media, historian Ken Coates declared that “Allan Levine is quickly emerging as one of the country’s best popular historians.” With each new book he has written since then, Allan has worked at maintaining that high quality and building upon it.
The secret of his success is ensuring that his penetrating portraits of the powerful and powerless — for that is what readers truly want to know and learn about — are set with historical perspective and in a narrative written in an “easy style” — as Publishers Weekly put it in 2003. It is the reason many of his books are popular with university history professors and high school teachers in the United States and Canada who want to make the subject interesting and relevant to their students. He has delved into Canadian as well as American and European history.
As a freelance writer since the early 1980s, he has contributed more than 750 comment pieces and reviews. His work has appeared in such publications as the Globe and Mail, National Post, Maclean’s, Toronto Star and Saturday Night. Since 2010 he has been writing a column in the Winnipeg Free Press — a newspaper that he first began writing for in 1982 — in which he explains the history behind current events.
He has been interviewed in these same newspapers and appeared many times on radio and television in both Canada and the United States. He has also spoken and lectured in North America and Europe on many occasions.
A diverse author who moves easily between popular non-fiction and fiction, he has also written five historical mystery novels. Two of the books in his acclaimed Sam Klein Trilogy were published by Random House Germany.
