Wordfest & CAJ present Mark MacKinnon

Wordfest & CAJ present Mark MacKinnon

Hosted by Christina Frangou

At this crucial time for journalism, facts, and public trust in media, Wordfest and the Canadian Association of Journalists are proud to present a conversation with Mark MacKinnon, Senior International correspondent for The Globe and Mail, who has been covering international affairs and Canada’s role in the world since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. One of Canada’s most decorated foreign correspondents, MacKinnon has won the National Newspaper Award seven times. He was nominated in 2022 and again this year for his ongoing coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This timely afternoon conversation, hosted by journalist Christina Frangou, includes an audience Q&A and book signing. 

We are grateful to the Canadian Association of Journalists for making it possible to connect you with Mark MacKinnon. Click here for more information about the 2025 CAJ National Conference, taking place in Calgary May 30-31. 

About Mark MacKinnon

Mark MacKinnon is The Globe and Mail’s Senior International Correspondent. He has been internationally recognized for his coverage of the war in Syria, the rise of the so-called Islamic State, and the refugee crisis that followed. He was named Journalist of the Year at 2016 National Newspaper Awards for his 16,000-word story  The Graffiti Kids, which followed the lives of the teenagers who inadvertently started the war in Syria. His story "The Fearless" on the Ukrainian special forces team that rescued The Globe and Mail’s translators from Afghanistan—and the war they’ve fought since returning home to Ukraine—won the award for 2024 Story of the Year from the London-based Foreign Press Association. That feature is part of his comprehensive, human-driven reporting on the Russian war on Ukraine nominated for the 2025 National Newspaper Award in International Reporting. THe is the author of The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics, The China Diaries, an e-book of his train travels through the Middle Kingdom along with photographer John Lehmann. His essay, A view on the world, is included in A Nation’s Paper: The Glove and Mail in the Life of Canada, edited by John Ibbitson. In 2027, Penguin Random House will publish Fearless: At War with Ukraine’s Elite Special Forces. MacKinnon divides his time between London and Kyiv.

Website: Mark MacKinnon/The Globe and Mail

About A Nation's Paper

From Canada's newspaper of record for 180 years, here are 30 brilliant and provocative essays by a diverse selection of their writers on how The Globe and Mail covered and influenced major events and issues from the paper’s founding to the latest news.

Since 1844, The Globe and Mail and its predecessor, George Brown’s Globe, have chronicled Canada: as a colony, a dominion, and a nation. To mark the paper’s 180th anniversary, Globe writers explored thirty issues and events in which the national newspaper has steered the course of the country: Confederation, settler migrations, regional tensions, tussles over language, religion, and race. The essays reveal a tapestry of progress, conflict, and still-incomplete reconciliation: Catholic-Protestant hostilities that are now mostly the stuff of memory; the betrayal of Indigenous peoples with which the newspaper—and the country—still grapples; the frustrations and triumphs of women journalists; pandemics then and now; environmental challenges; the joys of covering sports and the arts; the highs and lows of chronicling the nation’s business and world affairs;  the impossibility of Canada and of this newspaper, which both somehow flourish nonetheless.

Riveting, insightful, troubling, witty, and with black-and-white photographs throughout (plus a full-colour photographic essay), A Nation’s Paper examines a country and a newspaper that have grown and struggled together—essential reading for anyone who wants to understand where we came from and where we are going. 

The Globe and Mail will donate all its proceeds from the book to Journalists for Human Rights.

About The New Cold War (2007)

An intrepid investigation into the pro-democracy movements that have reshaped the Eastern bloc since 2000, reopening the Kremlin’s wounds from the Cold War.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later, liberal democracy was supposed to fill the void left by Soviet communism. Poland and Czechoslovakia made the best of reforms, but the citizens of the “Evil Empire” itself saw little of the promised freedom, and more of the same old despots and corruption. A second wave of reforms—Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004, as well as Kyrgyzstan’s regime change in 2005—have proven almost as monumental as those in Berlin and Moscow. The people of the Eastern bloc, aided in no small part by Western money and advice, are again rising up and demanding an end to autocracy. And once more, the Kremlin is battling the White House every step of the way.

Mark MacKinnon spent these years working in Moscow, and his view of the story and access to those involved remains unparalleled. With The New Cold War, he reveals the links between these democratic revolutions—and the idealistic American billionaire behind them—in a major investigation into the forces that are quietly reshaping the post-Soviet world.

About Host Christina Frangou

Christina Frangou is a Calgary journalist who writes about health and social issues. Her stories have appeared in The Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Maclean's and The Guardian, among others, and cover topics like refugee health, domestic violence, loneliness and widowhood. Frangou has received a National Newspaper Award and multiple National Magazine Awards for feature writing. In 2022, she was awarded the Landsberg Award from the Canadian Women’s Foundation and Canadian Journalism Foundation for her work shedding light on gender injustice in Canada. 

Website: christinafrangou.com
Bluesky: cfrangou.bsky.social
Instagram/Threads @thatcmf

Be Curiouser

• The Fearless: At War with Ukraine’s Elite Special Forces. -The Globe and Mail
• Update: Syria's 'Graffiti Kid' is recasting his role in history. -The Globe and Mail
• Profile: Mark MacKinnon shares his experiences reporting on Russia's war in Ukraine. –The Varsity