Todd Babiak
Todd Babiak is a Canadian writer and entrepreneur living in Tasmania. He is the CEO of Brand Tasmania and helped start Story Engine and Places are People.
He has written several bestseller novels. His first novel, Choke Hold, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and won the Henry Kreisel Award. His second novel, The Garneau Block, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, won the City of Edmonton Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Alberta Book Award for best novel. The Garneau Block was adapted for the stage by Belinda Cornish and premiered in September 2021 at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton.
The Book of Stanley is in development as a television series. His screenplay The Great One, co-written with Jason Margolis, won a Praxis Screenwriting Fellowship. His fourth novel, Toby: A Man, was published in January 2010, shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and won the Georges Bugnet Award for best work of fiction by an Alberta author.
He was a columnist for the Edmonton Journal for 10 years. Come Barbarians, his fifth novel, a literary thriller set in France, was published in late 2013 by HarperCollins and named a Globe and Mail best book. Its sequel, Son of France: A Christopher Kruse Novel, was published in 2016 by HarperCollins. His latest novel, The Empress of Idaho, was published by McClelland and Stewart in 2019. In October 2021, McClelland and Stewart planned to publish his next book, The Spirit's Up, a Christmas novel, in Canada and the United States.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 10:00 (CET).