So This Is Love

Gilbert Reid is a writer of fiction, and television and radio documentaries. He has written and broadcast widely on many subjects - including warfare, weapons technology, religion and mythology, eroticism and sexuality, and the life and death of nations. Creator of V and the Adventures of V, Gilbert is also the author - with the late Jacqueline Park - of Son of Two Fathers, a historical novel set in the Italian Renaissance, and of two acclaimed short story collections: So This is Love: Lollipop and Other stories, and Lava and Other Stories. For thirty years, Gilbert lived, studied, and worked in Europe. For six years, he taught English and 19th and early 20th century English Literature - from Jane Austen to James Joyce - at the University of Messina in Sicily, to wonderful groups of students from Sicily and Calabria. For two years, Gilbert was press attaché at the Canadian Embassy to Italy. For eleven years, he was Director of the Canadian Cultural Center in Rome, working with the infinitely talented Elena Solari. As a journalist and book reviewer, Reid has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The Globe and Mail, Il Tempo, and many other publications. As an informal script doctor and script developer, he worked in Rome with personalities such as the inventor of the spaghetti western, Sergio Leone, the Italian star Marcello Mastroianni, and, in Toronto, with Canada's eccentric virtuoso filmmaker Don Owen. For almost a decade, Reid worked in public relations in Italy with numerous cultural and film festivals - in Taormina, Sorrento-Naples, Spoleto, Venice, and others. He served as a diplomat in Ottawa, London, and Rome. He worked as an economist - focusing on international economic policy coordination - at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. He worked briefly as an adventure travel guide for the French company Nouvelles Frontières in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. He worked as a Canadian press attaché for two Group of Seven Economic Summits held in Venice in 1980 and 1987. He was on the International Administrative Committee of the Biennale of Venice for many years. And - with an Italian virtuoso of public relations, Simona Barabesi - he created, edited, and wrote for a glossy, high-quality Italian-language promotional magazine, Canada Contemporaneo. Since returning to Canada in 1994, Gilbert has written fiction and produced and written for television and radio. He is fluent in English, French, and Italian, and has written and broadcast in those languages. He can get by in German and, to a limited extent, in Spanish. Gilbert Reid has a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the University of Toronto, a M.Sc. (Econ) in monetary economics from the London School of Economics, and a B.A. in English literature from the University of Cambridge. He studied for two years at Birkbeck College, University of London (an unfinished Ph.D. on the French novels of Samuel Beckett). And he attended the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) as an auditeur libre, specializing in international economic and diplomatic relations.