Gerald Hallowell was born in Port Hope, Ontario, and grew up on a nearby farm. A graduate of the University of Toronto and Carleton University, he worked for over twenty years as an editor at the University of Toronto Press, retiring as senior editor, Canadian history, in 2000. In 1996 he was elected for a three-year term to the council of the Canadian Historical Association. He edited The Oxford Companion to Canadian History, published in 2004. His previous book, The August Gales: The Tragic Loss of Fishing Schooners in the North Atlantic, 1926 and 1927, won the Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing in 2014. Since 1989 he has lived in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.