About Christopher
Christopher Donville has spent more than three decades interviewing people, following complex stories and trying to understand what sits underneath the obvious version of events.
His career in journalism began with The Canadian Press and included work in radio and at the Calgary Herald before he joined Bloomberg News, where he spent 23 years as a reporter and editor covering business, people and events across North America and Asia.
With a degree in Political Science and a career that has taken him across industries, countries and cultures, Christopher brings an unusually broad frame of reference to the people he interviews. He understands business and politics, but also sport, history, institutions, family dynamics and the larger forces that shape a person's choices and opportunities.
That matters because the chronology of a life is rarely the most interesting part of it.
What matters is what happened behind the milestones.
The judgement behind a defining decision. The friendship that changed a career. The risk nobody else understood. The setback that altered everything. The rivalry, conviction, accident of timing or unexpected opportunity that sent a life in a different direction.
A good biographer needs to recognize those moments when they appear, even when the person telling the story does not yet realize how important they are.
Christopher founded Legacy Writers in 2016 to bring the rigour of serious journalism and the craft of narrative writing to private lives.
His work begins with conversation, many hours of it.
He listens closely, follows unexpected threads and asks the question behind the first question. He researches the people, places and events surrounding a life. He works with photographs, letters, documents, archives and family recollections. Gradually, a much larger picture begins to emerge.
Then he writes.
Not a résumé in book form. Not a catalogue of achievements. And not simply a collection of reminiscences.
A narrative.
A book with character, context, humour, contradiction and consequence. A book that captures not only what happened, but something of what it felt like to be the person living through it.
Christopher is an intelligent and deeply curious interviewer, but he is also an exceptionally human one. He is warm, engaging and generous with his attention. People tend to trust him.
That trust matters.
The most revealing stories in a life are not always the easiest ones to tell. They can involve ambition, money, difficult decisions, complicated relationships, mistakes, losses and things that look quite different in hindsight than they did at the time.
Christopher approaches those stories with honesty, discretion and respect. His job is neither to flatter nor to judge. It is to understand.
For someone who has built a company, led an organization, crossed continents, served a community, raised a family, pursued a calling or simply lived through an extraordinary stretch of history, the resulting book becomes something rare: a thoughtful, beautifully written account of the life behind the accomplishments.
Legacy Writers exists because Christopher believes a significant life deserves more than a collection of photographs or a few stories passed from one generation to the next.
It deserves to be understood.
It deserves to be beautifully written.
And it deserves to last.
Great lives deserve great writers.