Thomas Hedley

Early life

Career

• As editor-in-chief of Toronto Life, Hedley turned it into the “magazine of the year” and published, among others, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Robertson Davies and won the national magazine award for a short story by Alice Munro.
• Hedley was the youngest ever editor of Esquire working for Harold Hayes in New York. During his tenure, he worked with writers and artists of the time including Tom Wolfe, Michael Herr, Diane Arbus, Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, Gay Talese and Robert Coover. He produced a number of cover-sections including The Decline and Fall of the American Avant Garde in which he commissioned a play by Sam Shepard that was eventually performed at Lincoln Center, Claes Oldenburg’s last happening and a photographic essay on The New Theater by Andy Warhol. He commissioned and published essays by Federico Fellini, François Truffaut, and Michelangelo Antonioni, among others, and asked the directors to direct their own self-portraits.
• He produced and directed four documentaries for the CBC’s flagship current affairs program and wrote a number of produced screenplays including Circle of Two, Mr. Patman, Double Negative, Fighting Back, and Flashdance.
• He recently finished a two-year period in London as Publisher of Duckworth, the 105-year-old publishers of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. He created a new imprint called Duck Editions, which book awards and books-of-the-year status in the leading British journals and newspapers.

  Personal life