Leah McLaren

Who is Leah McLaren?

Leah McLaren is a Canadian author and newspaper columnist.

Born in Peterborough, Ontario, McLaren attended Claude Watson School for the Arts in Toronto. She studied English literature at McGill University in Montreal, and Trent University in Peterborough, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the latter in 1998. While at Trent she wrote the radio drama Percy and the Pomegranate.

When she was eighteen, McLaren worked as an intern and wrote a feature article for the Canadian monthly This Magazine. After several summers as an intern at The Globe and Mail McLaren became an arts reporter, and then the newspaper's London arts correspondent. While in England, her writing was published in several newspapers including The Times, The Evening Standard, and The Sunday Telegraph, as well as in the weekly magazine The Spectator, for which she wrote a controversial and widely read cover story on the romantic failure of the modern English male. In 2008, the CBC shot Abroad, a television movie of the week, written and produced by McLaren and based on her experiences as a young Canadian newspaper reporter living and dating in London. It aired once, on March 14, 2010 and was being developed as a series; until CBC Television axed it before any other episodes were made.