Joshua Knelman is an award-winning arts and investigative journalist and editor. He was a founding member of The Walrus magazine. His writing has also appeared in The Walrus, Toronto Life, TORO, Saturday Night, CBCarts.ca, The National Post, Quill & Quire, and The Globe & Mail, where he is a frequent contributor. Knelman’s feature article "Artful Crimes" in The Walrus was the result of a three-year investigation into the international black market of stolen arts and antiquities and won Canada’s National Magazine Awards 2006 gold medal for Arts and Entertainment.

Knelman is also the fiction editor of Four Letter Word: A Collection of Fictional Love Letters due out November 2008 from Chatto & Windus, UK.

Forthcoming:

HOT ART: Crimes of Love, Obsession and Theft
(Raincoast Books, 2009)

Awards:

• 2006 Gold Medal for writing, Arts and Entertainment
  Canada’s National Magazine Awards, “Artful Crimes”, The Walrus
   

Work on offer:

HOT ART is an unpretentious, informative exposé that entertains as it investigates – a cross between true crime and CNN style reportage.

If you love art here is the bad news: on all fronts, the battle against art theft is being lost. Global art crime is moving with such speed that in recent years illicit trafficking of cultural property has discreetly moved up the ranks of international crime to join the grim trinity of arms, drugs and money laundering. UNESCO now ranks it second only to guns. Legitimate art is big business, but its shadow industry has matured into a boom worth six to eight billion dollars annually. The Western world’s addiction to hot art gives no signs of slowing. These crimes of art are becoming more violent, brazen, and perversely imaginative.

HOT ART will explore the often mysterious and brutal transgressions that smash the global and cultural barriers between international criminal networks, society’s elite collectors, gallery owners, and dealers, and most importantly the police officers who investigate these mostly unsolved crimes. Forget the fact that we’re virtually ignorant of this booming shadow industry, we are also completely unequipped to police it because there are very few international laws being enforced and police across the globe are always two steps behind the sophisticated criminals stealing art and the obsessive collectors they feed.

The rush to hot art is not going gently away — it is exploding across our globe.

World Rights Available Ex:
Canada:	Canada English and French: Raincoast Books – 2009
	Proposal Materials Available