Three times longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, a literary award given to a Canadian author of a novel or short story collection published in English the previous year, Michael Christie had his eyes opened by skateboarding as a kid in Thunder Bay, Ontario. He used the determination skateboarding forged in him to go from working on video parts to working on novels that deal with mental illness, nature, the complexities of humans, and even skateboarding.