Robert Carr

Born in Bucharest, Romania, Robert Carr fled the Communist regime at the age of 24 through Bulgaria and Turkey. After relatively brief stays in France, where he was granted refugee status, and then Israel, he settled in Canada.

Robert lives with his wife, a lawyer, in Toronto. He has two adult children.

Trained as an engineer – a bachelor degree from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, and a master degree from University of Toronto – Robert worked in the aerospace field for many years. He was involved in the development of Canadarm – the robotic crane attached to NASA’s Space Shuttle – and of Canada’s robotic contributions to the International Space Station. Toward the end of his engineering career he participated in concept studies for ESA’s Mars rovers.

He began writing fiction in 1998-1999, almost by accident, prompted by his desire to record his mother’s stories of her family, childhood and youth.

His short story Lard and Oysters has been included in an anthology volume, TOK: Writing the New Toronto (Book 1), published in May 2006.

In August 2007 Robert retired in order to write full time.

His first novel, Continuums, was published in the fall of 2008. Intended at first as a fictional account of his flight from Romania and his half-year in Paris, it became in its long gestation the story of a woman mathematician trying to balance her career and her family. Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis and a historic mathematical discovery left unheralded because of the start of WW2 are additional storylines.

A second novel, A Question of Return, was published in November 2015. It has two narrative strands (which eventually come together): one, in 1985, in Toronto, the other in Stalin’s Russia. A Question of Return is about a son’s promise to publish his father’s secret journal and his struggle to keep his promise, about the tragic last two years in the life of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva and her terrible death in the small town of Yelabuga, about literary life under Stalin, about emigration, about artistic fame, about the toxic agents and effects of communism reaching its victims anywhere and anytime. It is also a love story.

Corby Falls is the tentative title of the novel Robert is currently working on. It has as protagonist a minor character from A Question of Return, and it could be viewed as a sequel to it.

Robert is a member of the Writers Union of Canada.