Don LePan


Don LePan is widely known as a book publisher; he is the founder and CEO of the academic publishing house Broadview Press. He is also a painter and the author or editor of several books, most notably the dystopian novel Animals.

Biography

LePan grew up in Ontario, living variously in Ottawa, Kingston, and Toronto. He received a BA in English Literature from Carleton University in Ottawa and an MA in Renaissance Studies from the University of Sussex, where he studied under A.D. Nuttall; his research on Shakespeare’s plots became the basis for a monograph. He worked for some years in the 1970s and 1980s for the Canadian branch of Oxford University Press, and from 1982-1985 as a secondary school teacher in rural Zimbabwe with the development agency WUSC. In 1985 he returned to Canada to found Broadview Press, a book publisher in the humanities and social sciences. By 2020 Broadview had grown to a company with annual revenues of over $4 million and a staff of 30. Though modest in size, the publishing house is held in high regard, particularly as a publisher of anthologies and literary editions; in 2004 LePan was awarded an honorary doctorate by Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario for his contribution to academic publishing. He remains the company's CEO, though he has been semi-retired from publishing since 2024.
LePan’s father, Douglas LePan, was well known as a poet and academic; his brother, Nicholas Le Pan, is well known as a Canadian civil servant.

''Animals: A Novel'' and Other Works of Fiction

LePan’s Animals: A Novel is set in an indeterminate future in which virtually all the species that humans have used as food have become extinct; it tells the story of a "mongrel" child who is twice abandoned and then comes face to face with the equivalent in this future world of the factory farming of today. The novel was published in 2009 in Canada and in 2010 in the USA, to sparse but generally favorable newspaper reviews —and to widely diverging reactions elsewhere. Notably enthusiastic was a review in the University of Toronto Quarterly. Others, however, have criticized the work as being "didactic" or "preachy." On his blog LePan has defended the notion that the aesthetic and moral need not be regarded as mutually exclusive—in his words, "it should not be assumed that a work that tries to do good cannot also be good."
LePan's second novel, Rising Stories, a story of a child and their grandmother and of Chicago skyscrapers, which hovers between realism and fantasy, has been largely ignored; his third, Lucy and Bonbon, which like Animals explores the lines that we draw between humans and other animals, has also attracted little attention.

Watercolor Painting

As a painter, LePan has specialized in large watercolor cityscapes; a solo exhibition was held in Brooklyn in 2008; a larger selection of these paintings has been published in a 2025 book.

Selected works

  • The Birth of Expectation. Macmillan Press, 1989. Paperback published by Broadview Press, 1996.
  • The Broadview Guide to Writing. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 6/e edition 2015.
  • The Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1/e 2006.
  • The Broadview Anthology of Expository Prose. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2/e edition 2011.
  • Animals: A Novel. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 2009. . Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2010.
  • The Broadview Pocket Glossary of Literary Terms. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2013.
  • Rising Stories: A Novel. Nanaimo: Press Forward, 2015.
  • How to be Good with Words. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2017.
  • Lucy and Bonbon: A Novel. Toronto: MiroLand, 2022. ISBN 978-1-77183-718-7