Russell Smith - We are very honoured to have as our next most fascinating person alive, Mr. Smith, who, aside from being the most handsomest novelist writing today, is also one of the best. (Elizabeth insists that the suit section in his Men’s Style book is better than sex)

Visit his website and say hello.

Let us know of anyone you find fascinating; maybe we will feature them in an upcoming edition. As always, bribes are most welcome.

Photograph © Jowita Bydlowska

Russell Smith is a novelist and journalist. He was born in South Africa, grew up in Halifax, Canada, and now lives in Toronto, where he writes a weekly column for the Globe and Mail on culture and language. His most recent novel is Muriella Pent, a comedy set in Toronto. It was nominated for the Rogers Fiction Prize and the Impac Dublin Literary Award.

His first non-fiction book, Men’s Style: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Dress, was published in Canada in 2005 and in the U.S. in 2007.

In 2003 he published a book of pornographic fiction under the pseudonym “Diane Savage”. That novella, Diana: A Diary In The Second Person has just been reprinted, with a new introduction by the author, under his name.

In 2006-2007 he was the host of the popular CBC Radio One weekly program on language, “And Sometimes Y”.

He is currently the editor of the online men’s magazine XYCanada.com

The Pomegranate Questionnaire

1.    Can you tell us a little about what you do?

I am a novelist, and a freelance cultural commentator for the Globe and Mail and the CBC.

2.    Why that?

I studied literature at university and always wanted to be a novelist. I wish my novels would pay the bills, but, although they are critically well received (on the whole!), they have not been lucrative. Freelance writing and broadcasting is my day job.

3. Does it pay the bills? Does it matter?

See above. Of course it fucking matters!

4. What book did you last read?

I’m in the middle of Atomised by Michel Houellebecq and loving it.

5. What is your idea of prefect happiness?

Prefect happiness? Well, I suppose if one has to be a prefect one might as well be the head prefect. I wouldn’t want to wear an armband or something, like at my old school. I would prefer to have to wear an embroidered waistcoat, like the “gods” at Eton. (You can see these amazing costumes in the great film Another Country, with a young Rupert Everett.) And I would love to have a bunch of fags. (That is the technical term: look it up.)

6. What achievement are you most happy about so far?

My seven published books.

7. What is your most treasured possession?

Hmmm. Not one of my possessions is really keenly emotional to me. My computer holds all my recent work and music and photography, and not all of it is backed up (I know, I know I should), so if I lost that it would be a disaster. I also have some lovely paintings by friends. And the two leather-bound volumes of the Pleiade edition of Paul Eluard’s complete works.

8. Have you swooned in the cinema?

No. I don’t like the contact with masticating humanity that a trip to the cinema necessitates.

9. Do you have a hero?

Paul Eluard

10. What is your motto or favourite expression or both?

I like Sartre’s “I did what I wanted and I wanted what I did.”

I also like Benjamin Disraeli’s “Never complain and never explain”.

And Eluard apparently once said “There is another world, but it is within this one,” which suits my rationalist worldview.