A 2000 Torgi Award winner, Always Give a Penny to a Blind Man is a charming and engaging memoir about growing up poor in an English working-class family during the Depression. Wright was born into a family of ten children. His father was a carter who drove horses and his mother worked as a tailoress. With no hot water, baths once a week and often short of food, life was hard but the family got by with resourcefulness and tenacity. Wright was able to win a scholarship and this enabled him to get an education which eventually helped him rise above his circumstances. After working in 1950s England, he decided to emigrate to Canada. The story culminates with his experiences as a young man working in the Canadian North. A superbly written memoir, Always Give a Penny to a Blind Man paints invaluable portraits of British working-class life and the quintessential Canadian immigrant experience, circa the 1950s. Originally published in hardcover in 1999.

Best known as a writer of award-winning detective fiction, including the Charlie Salter mysteries, Eric Wright has also written a comic novel (Moodies Tale) and Always Give a Penny to a Blind Man, his 1999 memoir which was nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. (The first chapter of that memoir first appeared in The New Yorker.) Eric helped to set up and was the first director of the publishing program at Ryerson University. He lives in Toronto.

Eric Wright's profile page