Jimmy Thomson

James (Jimmy) Thomson is a Vancouver-based freelance journalist. His work has been published in The Globe and Mail, VICE, the Toronto Star, National Geographic, BCBusiness Magazine, The Tyee, Canadian Geographic, CTV, and CBC Radio, among others.

He has reported from eight countries – six of them in the Arctic – on topics ranging from climate change to war refugees to cannibal rat-infested ghost ships. He has gathered audio from a Coast Salish sweat lodge, photos of a Syrian prosthetics workshop, and video of crab fishing in the Norwegian Arctic. In the pursuit of a good story he has slept on converted Russian spy ships, Chinese farmers’ plank beds, and in a tent under the midnight sun. His work has been translated into French and Russian, and he played a minor role in finding John Franklin’s lost ships in the High Arctic.

James’s graduate studies were supported by a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and he is a recipient of the 2014 Norwegian High North Journalism Award as well as the Susan M. Boyce Graduate Scholarship in Journalism for his dedication to “preserving the value and integrity of the written word,” and a 2014 International Development Research Council journalism award. James has participated in Canada’s only Indigenous Reporting program and UBC’s International Reporting Program.