Line Breaks: A Writing Life tells the story of George Galt's deeply religious childhood, the turmoil of his escape from the ultra-conservative values of his family, and his ultimate success in gaining a toehold in the realm of books and writing as poet, non-fiction writer, and editor.
A settler clan with nineteenth-century Canadian roots, the Galts had produced judges, businessmen, and a confederation-era cabinet minister. In Scotland, the family's patriarch had been an improvident author of some distinction, the novelist John Galt, who settled briefly in Canada in the 1820s. George's family established itself in Winnipeg and moved to Montreal when his father took up a job with the Sun Life Assurance Company, of which he was CEO when the company moved its head office out of Quebec in 1978.
The son of a remote father with a brilliant mathematical mind and a child-averse mother, George grew up in an English-speaking world that was out of touch with the Quebec nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Experiencing an intellectual earthquake when he left school, he broke with his family and, after completing his university degree, left Montreal to escape the long shadow of his lineage and remake himself as a writer.

George Galt's profile page

George Galt, who grew up in Quebec, and attended schools in Montreal and the Eastern Townships, has degrees from Concordia University and the University of Toronto. He began publishing poetry in literary magazines in the 1970s, became a freelance journalist, editor, and author based in Toronto, wrote Whistlestop—chronicling four months of travel across Canada—as well as Trailing Pythagoras, an account of his half-year living in Greece, and a novel, Scribes and Scoundrels, that offers a comic look at mass media. He now lives in Victoria, B.C., where in 2022 he founded the literary press Stonehewer Books.

?Charming, astute, witty, and insightful. Line Breaks is a lovely book about books by someone who knows intimately the form, and content, of the writerly heart." —Charles Foran, author of Mordecai and Just Once, No More