Nicholas Köhler

Hi, thanks for visiting. I first set this page up when I was a Toronto-based freelance writer and journalist. These days I am a features writer at the Ottawa Citizen.

As a freelancer I published pieces in newyorker.com, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Life magazine, the Literary Review of Canada, the West End Phoenix, the South China Morning Post, The Christian Science Monitor, Reader’s Digest and the Toronto Star. I was occasionally on the radio, with appearances on The Current with Anna Maria Tremonti, a CBC Radio program, and on This American Life, the U.S. public radio show.

I have reported from around the world, including New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and northeast Japan after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. I also worked as a reporter at Mizzima News, a multimedia news outlet based in Yangon, Myanmar.

Between 2019 and 2025 I worked as an editor with Apple News, based in Toronto. As a longtime staffer at Maclean’s, I wrote about politics, crime and culture from across North America, including three years as the magazine’s Calgary bureau chief. Before that I worked at the National Post, as a crime reporter.

I’ve received one National Newspaper Award nomination and 12 Canadian National Magazine Award nominations (I won a silver NMA in 2016 for my Maclean’s profile of Elton McDonald, whose secret tunnel in north Toronto captured the imaginations of readers around the world). My first newspaper job was at The Sioux Lookout Bulletin, in Sioux Lookout, Ont., pop. 5,000, well northwest of Thunder Bay.

I studied philosophy at McGill, got a master’s in journalism at Carleton, and have spent time living in Europe, Asia and South America. I’ve published fiction in The Antigonish Review, and have written a novel, The Enchanted Prisoner, set in the gambling underworld of 1950s Hull, Que.

You can write me at nick [at] nicholaskohler [dot] com or nkohler [at] postmedia [dot] com. I am nicohina37 on Instagram and @nicohina on Twitter. You can also find me on Facebook.