Dean Jobb is an award-winning Nova Scotia author and journalist who specializes in recreating crimes that offer a window on the past.
His book Empire of Deception (published in 2015 by Algonquin Books in the United States and HarperCollins Canada), the story of 1920s Chicago con man Leo Koretz and his escape to a life of luxury and excess in Nova Scotia, won the Chicago Writers Association and Crime Writers of Canada book-of-the-year awards and was a finalist for Canada’s top award for nonfiction, the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize.
He is also the author of The Acadians: A People’s Story of Exile and Triumph. Calculated Risk: Greed, Politics and the Westray Disaster, his groundbreaking investigation of the explosion that killed twenty-six workers at Nova Scotia’s Westray coal mine in 1992, was runner-up for Canada’s National Business Book Award. In 2021 Algonquin Books and HarperCollins Canada will publish The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer.
Dean writes a monthly true crime column, “Stranger Than Fiction,” for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and is a contributing writer for the Chicago Review of Books. His work has appeared in Canadian, American, and European publications. He was a reporter, editor, and political columnist during a twenty-year newspaper career with the Halifax Chronicle Herald. His investigative reports have been nominated for Canada’s National Newspaper and National Magazine awards and he is a three-time winner of Atlantic Canada’s top journalism award.
Dean is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax, where he is an instructor and cohort director in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction Program. He is the author of the textbook Media Law for Canadian Journalists and has contributed chapters to books on a range of subjects, including true crime, research and storytelling techniques, press freedom, and the birth of political satire. He lives in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.