Robert Lecker

Robert Lecker is a Canadian scholar, author, and Greenshields Professor of English at McGill University, where he specializes in Canadian literature. He received the H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching at McGill University in 1985. Lecker is a leading authority on Canadian literature. In 2012, Lecker was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in recognition of his influential studies on literary value in English Canada and Canadian cultural identity. In addition to his teaching and academic writing, Lecker has held a number of prominent positions in the Canadian publishing industry throughout his career. He co-founded ECW Press in 1977, he co-edited the Canadian literary journal Essays on Canadian Writing between 1975 and 2004, he has edited several anthologies of Canadian and international literature, and he currently heads a literary agency in Montreal, the Robert Lecker Agency.

Lecker was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec and began his university studies at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in 1970. The following year, he transferred to York University in Toronto where he met Jack David, who had founded the critical journal Essays on Canadian Writing in 1974. Lecker joined the editorial board of ECW in 1975.

Lecker completed his BA (1974), MA (1976), and PhD (1980) in English at York and was awarded a number of fellowships and scholarships throughout these years. Lecker discusses his formative experiences at York in his 2006 memoir, Dr. Delicious. His PhD dissertation, “Time and Form in the Contemporary Canadian Novel,” examines disruptive representations of time in seven Canadian novels written between 1968 and 1977.

In 1977 Lecker and Jack David founded ECW Press, which was originally devoted to publishing reference works and critical studies about Canadian literature. The press expanded and moved into commercial trade publishing in the mid-1990s. Lecker managed the Montreal office and David ran the Toronto office. In 2003, Lecker left the press to start his own literary agency, Robert Lecker Agency.

Between 1978 and 1982, Lecker was Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maine at Orono.

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