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Biography

Award-winning journalist and best-selling author David Staples, born and raised in Devon, Alberta, and a resident of Edmonton since 1985, has been a journalist for 30 years, reporting on crime, politics, sports, the arts and current events.

He is the co-author of the best-selling true crime story The Third Suspect: Inside the Hunt for the Yellowknife Mass Murderer, and the author of Barb's Miracle: How Barb Tarbox Turned Her Deadly Cancer Into A Lifesaving Crusade. His profile of businessman and convicted felon Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom is included in the anthology Best Business Crime Writing of the Year, edited by James Surowiecki, business columnist for The New Yorker. David also contributed a number of chapters on war history and criminal history to Ted Byfield's History of Alberta series.

A graduate of the Carleton School of Journalism and a Southam Fellow at the University of Toronto, he has worked full-time at the Edmonton Journal since 1985. He has won two National Newspaper Awards (1992, with Greg Owens, on the Giant Mine mass murder; 2005, as part of a Journal team on James Roszko's mass murder of four RCMP officers) and won two National Newspaper Award citations of merit (1990, with Cam Cole and Tom Barrett, on Grant Fuhr's cocaine use; 2006, on the social history of the law of infanticide). His hockey blog, The Cult of Hockey, has been the most popular sports blog in the Postmedia network. His new blog, The Edmonton Commons, will focus on urban affairs in Edmonton.

He has written major profiles of numerous prominent Albertans and Canadians, including hockey players Mark Messier, Kevin Lowe and Craig MacTavish; Olympic skater Elvis Stojko; journalist Eddie Keen; activist Mel Hurtig; social activist and eco-terrorist Wiebo Ludwig; murderers such as Clifford Sleigh, Thomas Svekla and James Roszko; artists Daphne Odjig, Alex Janvier and Norval Morrisseau, architect Douglas Cardinal; Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb; Lieutenant Governors Lois Hole and Normie Kwong; and politicians Peter Lougheed, Pam Barrett, Nancy MacBeth, Anne McLellan, Laurie Hawn, Thelma Chalifoux, Laurence Decore and Ralph Klein.

Staples is married to Lily Nguyen and has five children.

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