Ira Nadel held a Visiting Fellowship with the National Cente of Biography between 1 June -31 July 2016. He is an American-Canadian biographer and literary critic, professor of English at the University of British Columbia and winner of the 1996 Medal for Canadian Biography. His publications include Leon Uris, Life of a Bestseller (2010), scholarly editions of texts and edited collections on novelists. He has also considered biography as a form in works such as Biography, Fiction Fact & Form (1984) and Victorian Biography, A Collection of Essays from the Period (1986) and most recently Modernism’s Second Act, A Cultural Narrative (2013). He is currently completing a critical life of Virginia Woolf and working on wider issues of biography.

While a visiting fellow at the centre Ira attended the NCB’s True Biographies of Nations conference as part of his comparative study of the Australian and Canadian dictionaries of biography.