Michael David O'Brien (born 1948) is a Canadian author, artist, and essayist and lecturer on faith and culture.
Born in Ottawa, he is self-taught, without an academic background. He writes and speaks on Catholic themes and topics, and creates the cover art for his novels in a neo-Byzantine style. He lives with his family in Combermere, Ontario, Canada.
O'Brien's books have been published in a number of foreign languages, including Croatian, Czech, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish.
Contents
Early life
O'Brien was born in Ottawa and lived in Kugluktuk (then known as Coppermine) from ages 12 to 16. He attended a residential school in Inuvik, where he says he was abused by a dormitory supervisor. He graduated from grade 12 at St Patrick's College High School only with difficulty. As a youth, he was agnostic, leaning towards atheism, until his conversion to Catholicism when he was 21. He began to draw and paint shortly after, and had a successful gallery exhibition. Five years later, at the urging of his wife, he began to turn his artwork towards religious subjects. In 1994, at the age of 46, he began to write.
Works
Fiction
The Small Angel (White Horse Press, 1996)
Island of the World (Ignatius Press, 2007) – Josip Lasta is the son of an impoverished school teacher in a remote village high in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Waiting: Stories for Advent (Justin Press, 2010, ISBN 9780981318455)
Theophilos (Ignatius Press, 2010) – Historical fiction centred on Theophilos, here portrayed as the adoptive father of St. Luke the Evangelist.
Winter Tales (Justin Press, 2011)
A Father's Tale (Ignatius Press, 2011) – Canadian bookseller Alex Graham is a middle-age widower whose quiet life is turned upside down when his college-age son disappears without any explanation or trace of where he has gone. With minimal resources, the father begins a long journey that takes him for the first time away from his safe and orderly world.
Voyage to Alpha Centauri (Ignatius Press, 2013) – Set eighty years in the future, an expedition is sent from the planet Earth to Alpha Centauri, the star closest to the Solar System. The Kosmos, a great ship that the central character Neil de Hoyos describes as a "flying city", is immense in size and capable of more than half light-speed. Hoyos, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who has played a major role in designing the ship, signs on as a passenger.
The Fool of New York City (Ignatius Press, 2016)
The Lighthouse (Ignatius Press, 2020)
The Sabbatical (Ignatius Press, 2021)
By the Rivers of Babylon (Ignatius Press, 2022)
Letter to the Future (Ignatius Press, 2025)
Children of the Last Days series
Non-fiction
O'Brien's articles and lectures focus on his belief that Western civilization is in severe decline as well as heading towards a "New Totalitarianism". A significant amount of his writing appeared first in Nazareth Journal, of which he was founding editor.
O'Brien's book A Landscape with Dragons: The Battle for Your Child's Mind – described as controversial by its publisher – presents his concern that contemporary children's literature and culture has strayed from Christian ethics to a more pagan ideology where good and evil is not strongly defined. The book features O'Brien's examination of fantasy works ranging from C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings to Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern. One of the book's central claims is that any story in which dragons are presented sympathetically rather than as forces of evil is implicitly anti-Christian because of the traditional use of the dragon as a symbol for Satan.
O'Brien has been critical of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, comparing it unfavourably with the work of Tolkien.
O'Brien's non-fiction works include:
The Mysteries of the Most Holy Rosary (meditations and paintings, White Horse Press, 1992, Ignatius Press, 1994 ISBN 9780969639107)
A Landscape with Dragons: The Battle for Your Child's Mind (Ignatius Press, 1994, ISBN 9780898706789)
Remembrance of the Future: Reflections on Our Times (Justin Press, 2009)
Arriving Where We Started: Faith and Culture in the Postmodernist Age (Justin Press, 2011, ISBN 9780987780553, re-titled Father at Night)
William Kurelek: Painter & Prophet (Justin Press, 2013 ISBN 9780991934218)
(with Matthew [Maté] Krajina) Donkey Dialogues (Justin Press, 2014, ISBN 9780991934249)
Publishers
Much of O'Brien's non-fiction, and some of his fiction, has been published by Justin Press, a Catholic publishing house in Ottawa founded in 2009. The majority of his fiction, and some of his non-fiction, has been published by Ignatius Press, a Catholic publishing house founded in 1974 in San Francisco.
Other books by O'Brien have been published by Wiseblood Books and one of its imprints, Divine Providence Press.
Acknowledgements
Andrija Buvina Prize, awarded at the 2005 Christian Culture Days in Split