Alistair A. Vogan is many things: an education reformer, a Canadian satirist, an award-winning Q1-published researcher and writer in AI, robotics, and cognition, and an award-winning feature film story development specialist. He is Ivan Von Noshrilgram for the 21st Century. Or maybe it’s Forest Gump. …You decide.
Part David Sedaris, Malcolm Gladwell, and Yuval Noah Harari, his career in storytelling and working with great minds stretches three decades.
Highlights include the creation of media packages with a Canadian Prime Minister, authoring cognitive training research with renowned neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima (creator of Nintendo’s Brain Age etc) and feature film story development with Academy Award nominee and Saturday Night Live staff writer Adam McKay, Canadian comedy legend / director Bruce McCulloch and Susan Cavan with the Tom Green production ‘Stealing Harvard’.
In addition to being a contributing writer for the wildly popular The Kids In The Hall North American Reunion Tour, 'Same Guys, Different Dresses', and a produced playwright ('The Crash of Twenty-Nine'), he is a professional screenwriter and script doctor (Imagine Entertainment and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., etc) helping creatives achieve international recognition through The ABC New Talent Development Scholarship Grant Program, the Slamdance Screenplay Competition, Bravo!Fact, the Canadian Comedy Awards, the Ontario Media Development Corporation...
Alistair’s most recent narrative non-fiction work is the tentatively titled
PLEASE MAKE YOURSELF (UN)COMFORTABLE, Book 1 (of 3)
A genre-blurring work of narrative nonfiction, Please Make Yourself (Un)comfortable weaves together evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and cultural history to reveal a unifying principle at the heart of all innovation and behavior: the relentless drive to get “more for less.”
From the kitschy spectacle of Honest Ed’s bargain emporium to the metabolic logic behind consciousness itself, the book travels through stories of Charles Darwin, Karl Friston, Jules Verne, and the lowly sea squirt to show how life, in every form, is an expression of an ancient drive to conserve energy—even when it looks like chaos, beauty, or brilliance.
Blending the wit and storytelling acumen of Malcolm Gladwell with the insight of Robert Sapolsky, this book invites readers to see themselves—and their world—as elegant solutions to a deeper problem they never knew existed. (Find the Prologue and first chapter in our ‘non-fiction’ section above.)
Alistair is the author of The Ivan Von Noshrilgram Foundation classic…
HOW TO LOSE YOUR VOICE WITHOUT SCREAMING (Volume One).
Other works of fiction include the satirical:
MY HIDEOUS BLIND SPOT: A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION
Set in the late 90s, MY HIDEOUS BLIND SPOT: A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION highlights the Canadian Gen X experience of turning thirty as its most valued principles and Life’s expectations came into razor-sharp focus. Part homage to that period and those people, part biting/loving satire, you will likely recognize yourself and others in this work. (For this work there are two versions, the international edition, and the Middle Eastern edition. Both are available worldwide.)
And the hysterical…
BY DEGREES THE GENTLEST ASININE EXPRESSION.
This satirical collection, written in the spirit of David Sedaris, Mark Twain, and Woody Allen, captures the lives of two families across six decades and four continents and examines the unspoken connection between the Stockholm Syndrome and the family bond.
Alistair, his wife and, wild-cat daughters divide their time between Japan and the United Arab Emirates, where he pursues his other passion of developing and leading cutting-edge educational programs designed to raise the quality of teaching and learning in higher education. Most his summers are spent at his family home in Nara, Japan.
Alistair was born in Ottawa, Canada, in 1966.
