Sandra Martin is a journalist at the Globe and Mail . She has won writing prizes from the Society of Professional Obituary Writers, gold and silver National Magazine Awards, the Atkinson and William Southam Journalism Fellowships, and the Harvey Southam Lecturership at the University of Victoria. The co-author of three books, including Rupert Brooke in Canada and Card Tricks: Bankers, Boomers, and the Explosion of Plastic Credit, which was shortlisted for the Canadian Business Book Award, she is the editor of the bestselling and critically acclaimed collection, The First Man in My Life: Daughters Write about Their Fathers. She lives in Toronto with her husband, historian Roger Hall, and is the mother of two children.

... wonderful ... recent public life in Canada has included many fascinating and worthwhile characters. - Roger Currie, Winnipeg Free Press

... a dizzying, dazzling, ultimately affirming collection ... stirring and heartbreaking. - Robert J. Wiersema, Quill and Quire

Martin’s is a select history of Canada told through extended obituaries of both the known and the unknown, researched energetically and written graciously by one of the country’s leading journalists. - Paula Todd, Globe and Mail

Working the Dead Beat is the most engaging and enlivening book about Canada that I've come across this year. - Robert Fulford, National Post