Doug Saunders

Canadian journalist
the baseball player

Douglas Richard Alan Saunders (born 1967) is a British and Canadian journalist and author, and columnist for The Globe and Mail, a newspaper based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is the newspaper's international affairs columnist, and a long serving foreign correspondent formerly based in London and Los Angeles, and is the author of three books focused on cities, migration and population. He is currently a Berlin based resident fellow with the Robert Bosch Academy.

Saunders, a citizen of the United Kingdom and Canada, was born in the city of Hamilton, Ontario, educated in Toronto at York University. In his early twenties he was the Ottawa based national bureau chief and writer for the Canadian University Press wire service. In the early 1990s he built a career in what was then the new field of online research and computer assisted reporting for various Canadian journalists. He briefly worked as an editor for the left leaning This Magazine. In 1995 he joined the Globe and Mail as an editorial writer and feature writer. In 1999, he became the paper's correspondent in Los Angeles. He moved to London to become the paper's European Bureau Chief in 2004. He has spent extensive time writing from Europe, Turkey, Iran, the Indian subcontinent, Asia and North Africa, including substantial reporting from Libya, Egypt and Tunisia during the Arab revolutions of 2011, and in Ukraine during its 2013 14 upheavals. He is married to the writer Elizabeth Renzetti and lived in Toronto until 2019, when he moved to Berlin to become a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow with the Robert Bosch Academy. His column, Reckoning, appears on Saturdays in the newspaper's Focus section. From 2012 to 2015, he also served as the newspaper's online opinion editor, a position he used to create the Globe Debate online opinion and debate portal (now known as Globe Opinion). Saunders has won the National Newspaper Award on five occasions: in 1998, 1999, and 2000 for critical writing; and in 2006 and 2013 for column writing. In 2008, he was shortlisted for the award in international reporting, for a series of investigative articles on the state of the middle class around the world. He has also been shortlisted for the Canadian National Magazine Awards, in Public Issues. His works have been influential in the fields of urban planning and architecture. In 2016 he was awarded the Schelling Prize for Architectural Theory. He was also a co designer of the Germany pavilion in the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale; the pavilion was designed as a building sized illustration of Saunders' book Arrival City.