Damian Tarnopolsky is a writer, editor and teacher. 
His most recent work, The Defence, won the 2019 Voaden Prize, leading to a staged reading directed by Craig Walker at the Kingston WritersFest. His novel Goya’s Dog, the story of a dyspeptic British painter’s unhappy World War II exile in Toronto, was praised as “very funny and biting” by The Globe and Mail and “a compelling story of an artist at war” by Quill and Quire. It was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Canada/Caribbean) and the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. Lanzmann and Other Stories appeared with Exile Editions in 2006  and was nominated for the ReLit award. It was praised in the Toronto Star as “at turns surreal, serio-comic, whimsical and erotic,” and by eye weekly for its “authority, Nabokovian play and bawdiness” and “perfect, twisty sentences.” His short fiction has appeared in Maisonneuve, subTerrain, Exile: The Literary Quarterly, Audeamus, and elsewhere, and has been twice nominated for the Journey Prize, as well as the CBC Literary Award.
Damian Tarnopolsky  studied modern literature at Oxford University and writing at the Humber School for Writers, where he was mentored by Mavis Gallant. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, where he specialized in the later modernist novel and was awarded the President's Teaching Academy award. He has since published scholarly articles on such subjects as repetition in the works of Samuel Beckett and the unusual ending of Henry Green's novel Loving. He has taught writing, communications and literature at the University of Toronto, Humber College, the Junction Writes workshop, and the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, and was the 2014 and 2016-18 Barbara Moon/Ars Medica Editorial Fellow at Massey College. He now teaches creative and reflective writing to health practitioners at the Centre for Faculty Development at St. Michael’s Hospital, and leads A Rooster for Asclepius, a health-related writing group.
His articles and reviews appear regularly in the national press and online, in such publications as The Walrus, the Literary Review of Canada, Partisan, and The Globe and Mail, and for a time he was the Managing Editor of the Toronto Review of Books. He is currently the proprietor of Slingsby and Dixon, an editorial communications firm in Toronto, where he lives with his family.
He is represented by Martha Magor Webb at the McDermid Agency.