Laurie Sarkadi is an award-winning writer, producer and singer-songwriter living near Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. She is the author of Voice in the Wild, a memoir. Her non-fiction appears in Canadian Geographic, The Globe and Mail, walrus.ca, Up Here and several anthologies, including Dropped Threads 3: Beyond the Small Circle. Her debut album “Middle World” was released in June 2020.
Born in Brantford, Ontario, she grew up in nearby Guelph where she completed her Masters in English in 2021, under the supervision of Lawrence Hill. She attended Toronto Metropolitan University for journalism before unerring wanderlust took her to Europe, Africa, Western Canada and finally the Subarctic, where she’s lived off-grid for more than 30 years.
She moved to Yellowknife as the Edmonton Journal’s northern correspondent in 1989, reporting on the environment, women’s rights and the powerful struggle by Dene and Inuit to reclaim their inherent rights to self-government and self-determination. When the Journal closed its bureau she worked briefly as a policy analyst for the territorial Department of Aboriginal Affairs at the Beaufort-Delta and Deline self-government negotiating tables, then began a 16-year career with CBC North radio and television, earning an English Television Award for “Living Hope,” an interactive special on suicide prevention in Nunavut. She’s written and produced for CBC’s The National and The Current and was production manager in Canada for ZED’s feature-length documentary Ice Diamonds, by Paris-based director Jean Queyrat. She was also editor of Yellowknife’s hyper-local EDGE YK magazine during most of its years in publication. In 2023 she was a trainer for the Northern Journalism Training Initiative pilot project in Inuvik, NT.