Daniel Bezalel Richardsen

Daniel Bezalel Richardsen is a public servant at the Department of Finance Canada and a reservist with the Royal Canadian Navy at HMCS Carleton. He is the founder and former editor of Foment, the literary journal of the Ottawa International Writers Festival, as well as the festival’s Reviews blog.

Daniel is an alumnus of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers. He is a past prize advisor to The Ross and Mitchell Prize for Faith and Writing, as well as an advisory member of the Millennial Network for Cardus’s Faith in Canada 150 project. Daniel’s writing has appeared in the Toronto Star, Convivium, Comment, the Literary Review of Canada, ARC Poetry, The New Quarterly, the Catholic Register, Tablet, and National Post, among others.

Daniel was born in Madras (Chennai), India, and grew up there and in Brunei Darussalam before moving to Canada at age eighteen as an international student. He has a BSc from the University of Waterloo, and an MA from Trinity Western University. Daniel is currently pursuing graduate studies in theology at the University of St. Michael’s College and the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies at the University of Toronto.

Daniel was received into the Catholic Church in 2015 through the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, and worships at the Ordinariate parish in Ottawa, Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and also at St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Shrine with his wife Ivanka. Daniel belongs to the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, a lay Catholic movement, and is a third-degree member of the Knights of Columbus.