The Culprits

Born in Toronto in 1963, Robert Hough knew he wanted to become a writer in high school. After graduating in 1985 from Queen’s University, where he wrote satirical articles for the arts paper, Hough worked briefly in advertising before becoming a journalist. For about a dozen years, he wrote for such magazines as Toronto Life and Saturday Night before turning to books.Hough’s first book was originally intended to be a biography of Mabel Stark, a promiscuous and ribald 1920s lion tamer for Ringling Brothers Circus. Due to a general lack of documentation on Stark, Hough decided to write a novel instead. Published to rave reviews in 2001, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark was shortlisted for both the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and the Trillium Book Award and was sold into the US, the UK and twelve other countries. It is currently in development for a major motion picture starring Kate Winslet in the role of Stark.Hough’s second novel The Stowaway was also based on a true story, a fictionalized account of the Maersk Dubai incident, during which Romanian stowaways were found on board a Taiwanese freighter and thrown into the North Atlantic to die. One stowaway was protected by Filipino crewmen and survived. Hough conducted exhaustive research for the novel, locating and interviewing the Filipino crewmembers, as well as Romanian-Canadians who lived under the Ceausescu regime. The novel garnered critical praise and was published internationally. It was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Award, and was chosen by the Boston Globe as one of the top ten fiction books of 2004.With The Culprits, Hough once again riffs on reality, this time taking for the novel’s backdrop the Chechen conflict and a terrorist bombing that took place during a rock concert at a Moscow airbase in 2003. While researching the book, Hough stayed with a Russian family for a week in Saint Petersburg. “I had this really great guide named Tania Smirnova,” he recalls. “She was just nineteen, and she took me out to the bleak, god-forsaken suburbs that ring the city. It was worse than I could have imagined, and I have a dark imagination: communal apartments, drunken neighbours, graffiti-coated walls, broken down elevators, shot-out lights, general air of threatening despondency. It was late October, and the weather was freezing rain the whole time. It was a great trip.”Hough lives in Toronto with his wife and two daughters.