Julian is an award-winning investigative journalist -- a veteran TV documentary filmmaker as well as an accomplished newsroom trainer and the author of eight books which have been translated into several languages and sold in seven countries.

He has been an investigative journalist for Canada's two leading newspapers, the Toronto Star and the  Globe and Mail. As a writer and director of international documentaries, he has won numerable awards, including the Canadian Screen Award for Best Documentary (Ghosts of Afghanistan) and the prestigious Dupont-Columbia Award in New York (Nuclear Jihad). He was also the Senior Producer of CBC's the fifth estate, Canada's premier investigative TV program for five years.

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Award-winning author:

Julian’s latest book, co-written with his wife Lisa Fitterman, is Hitman: The Untold Story of Canada’s Deadliest Killer (2025). It chronicles the shocking story of a Hells Angels assassin who confessed to murdering at least 43 people but was never stopped by police and got a controversial sweetheart deal after turning informant.

His previous book tells the little-known story of Canada’s role in the American Civil War. The North Star: Canada and the Civil War Plots against Lincoln (2023) published by Penguin Random House, it became an Amazon Number One bestseller in Canada and the U.S. among books about the Civil War. It was hailed as “thought-provoking” and “powerful” by the Literary Review of Canada.

He also wrote the award-winning national bestseller Until You Are Dead: The Wrongful Conviction of Steven Truscott about Canada's most famous murder trial, which led to an official re-opening a 40-year-old case. The best-selling book has been re-issued with an updated afterword in 2023.

He has written two books on child safety. Somebody's Daughter: The Hidden Story of America's Prostituted Children and The Battle to Save Them (2011) was described by Publisher’s Weekly as "a thorough, deeply affecting study … [that] strikes a rare balance between revealing trauma and hope."

Reviewers called  One Child at a Time: The Global Fight to Rescue Children from Online Predators (2007) "riveting" "eye-opening and "gripping." His writings on child abuse have appeared on the front page of the New York Times, the cover of Maclean's magazine and the OpEd page of USA Today.

A recognized expert on the justice system and organized crime, Julian Sher has been widely interviewed on TV and radio.  He co-authored two books on outlaw motorcycle gangs, The Road to Hell (2003) and Angels of Death: Inside the Biker's Global Crime Empire (2006) which was called "a devastating indictment of the gangs' drug-running and racketeering across three continents."

His first book was White Hoods: Canada's Ku Klux Klan, (1983)an expose of racism in Canada which is still cited as the main source of the subject in the encyclopedias.

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International Filmmaker:
For more than three decades, Julian has filmed, written and produced major documentaries across the globe.  He covered scandals, wars and corporate intrigue in South Africa, Somalia, Holland, France, England, Costa Rica, Honduras, Mexico and all across the United States and Canada

He directed and co-wrote Kings of Coke, (2022) a true-crime documentary streaming on Crave TV that takes a searing look at cocaine and corruption.

His previous film Ghosts of Afghanistan (2021) which he directed and co-wrote for Galafilm and TVO, won three top Canadian Screen Awards (Canada's equivalent of the Emmys) for best documentary, best writing and best editing

Julian wrote and directed a New York Times-CBC TV investigation into nuclear terrorism called "Nuclear Jihad" which won the duPont-Columbia University Award, the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, in 2006.

More about his documentaries here.
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Journalism trainer:
As a newsroom trainer, Julian has taught journalists at CNN, the BBC, and in newspapers and TV networks across Canada and at journalism conferences of the CAJ in Canada and the IRE in the United States. Globally, he has trained correspondents from more than 25 countries for Al Jazeera Arabic including Lebanon, Turkey, France, Russia, Japan, Mauritania, Tunisia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, China, Libya, and Afghanistan. In Bangladesh he worked for four years with the Swedish FOJO Media Institute and MRDI; in Turkey with Syrian journalists for Journalists for Human Rights; and in the African countries of Tanzania, Ethiopia, Uganda, Ghana and Nigeria for the World Bank. He has consulted for the OECD in Paris and UNICEF in New York.

See samples of his training here.

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Media rights:

Julian has long been active in media and human rights issues. He is a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto’s Metropolitan University and works with Journalists for Human Rights. He is the former president of the Canadian Association of Journalists.


He is a graduate in Honours History from McGill University in Montreal, where he lives with his wife and fellow journalist, Lisa Fitterman.

Click here to contact Julian Sher.
Click here for photos to download.