Daniel Gawthrop was born in Nanaimo in 1963 and grew up there. After obtaining a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Victoria and a Journalism diploma at the University of King’s College, Halifax, he began his career as a newspaper reporter for the Hope Standard and Vancouver Sun and a freelance writer on current affairs, arts and politics. The first publisher/editor of Xtra! West, a gay and lesbian bi-weekly in Vancouver, he was also part of a writers group in the early 1990s that included such authors as Stan Persky, George Stanley, and Scott Watson. His first book, Affirmation: The AIDS Odyssey of Dr. Peter (New Star, 1994) was a biography of CBC television's “AIDS Diary” host in B.C. that examines its subject’s life and achievement in the context of the socio-political times in which he lived. Daniel followed this up with Highwire Act: Power, Pragmatism and the Harcourt Legacy (New Star, 1996), a critical account of the New Democratic Party administration of Mike Harcourt, the party’s inner ideological struggle, and the difficulties of governing in the politically polarized province of British Columbia. His third book, Vanishing Halo: Saving the Boreal Forest (Greystone/the David Suzuki Foundation, 1999), was a portrait of the world’s coniferous crown, and a plea for restrictions to the harmful logging and mining practices that have threatened it. The Rice Queen Diaries (Arsenal Pulp, 2005) is a memoir that explores the political and cultural minefields of desire and ethnicity between white and East Asian men on both sides of the Pacific. The Trial of Pope Benedict: Joseph Ratzinger and the Vatican’s Assault on Reason, Compassion, and Human Dignity (Arsenal Pulp, 2013), is an indictment of the conservative theologian who led the Roman Catholic Church's reactionary backlash against the progressive reforms of Vatican II. In 2023, Daniel published his first novel, Double Karma (Cormorant), the story of a Burmese-American photographer who travels to his father's native land in 1988 and, after getting caught up in the pro-democracy uprising, ends up stuck in Burma as the victim of mistaken identity. Since 2004, Daniel has worked full-time for the Canadian Union of Public Employees while writing occasional online essays for his blog and for The British Columbia Review, the Georgia Straight, The Tyee, and Dooneys Cafe. After many years in Vancouver he moved to New Westminster, B.C. in 2014 after a leave of absence from CUPE that he partly spent living and working in Yangon, Myanmar. He has also lived briefly in London, England and spent the first few years of the millennium in Bangkok, Thailand where he worked as a sub-editor at The Nation, an English daily.