Paul William Roberts is a Canadian writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Born in Wales and educated at Exeter College, Oxford, where he gained a second in English Language and Literature, Roberts moved permanently to Canada in 1980. He lived for several years prior to this in India, where he taught at Bangalore University and studied Sanskrit at the Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi.

While working on his first novel, The Palace of Fears, he worked as a television producer at the BBC, and then the CBC and Citytv in Toronto. He covered both the 1991 and 2003 Iraq wars for Harper's, winning numerous awards and accolades, including the 2005 inaugural PEN 'Paul Kidd Award for Courage in Journalism'.

While known to be a friend of Harper's editor Lewis H. Lapham, whom he regards as a mentor, he is believed to be something of a recluse. His non-fiction writing has always received highly enthusiastic reviews, but is difficult to categorize, being more memoir, political critique and history than travelogue. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.