Biography of Steven Galloway

Steven Galloway is a Canadian writer best known for his novel The Cellist of Sarajevo. Galloway was born on July 13th, 1975 in Vancouver, British Columbia. He attended the University College of the Cariboo and the University of British Columbia. He taught creative writing at the latter, as well as at Simon Fraser University.

Galloway has written four novels: Finnie Walsh (2000), Ascension (2003), The Celleist of Sarajevo (2008), and The Confabulist (2014). His books received numerous accolades.

Galloway was chair of Creative Writing at UBC when the university suspended him without pay for unspecified sexual harassment allegations. Many in the Canadian academic and literary worlds were concerned that Galloway had not received appropriate due process, and that the investigation, carried out by Mary Ellen Boyd, a former Justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia, was done in secret. Galloway was fired in June 2016. In December of that year he revealed he’d had an affair with a student and he apologized, but denied all other accusations. Madame Justice Boyd concluded for the UBC that Galloway had not committed sexual assault and dismissed other allegations of misconduct. The UBC Faculty Association verified this, and UBC had to pay Galloway $167,000 for violating his privacy rights and damaging his reputation. In 2018 Galloway published an essay claiming he was not "a monster," and later that year filed a defamation lawsuit against the woman who accused him of sexual assault (the same women with whom he’d had an affair) as well as two other UBC professors. This lawsuit continued throughout 2021; no further information is available at this time.


Study Guides on Works by Steven Galloway