Neill McKee is a Canadian retired teacher, international filmmaker, and nonfiction author presently concentrating on a travel memoir. His first book in this genre, Finding Myself in Borneo: Sojourns in Sabah (2019), has won three awards. His second travel memoir, Guns and Gods in My Genes (2020), is a deep dive into his ancestry written creatively. In 2021 he published Kid on the Go!, the third memoir, which follows his early life in Ontario, Canada.
Neill McKee holds a BA in Psychology from the University of Calgary and a Master of Science in Communication from Florida State University, Tallahassee (1988).
He has made a career as an international filmmaker and multimedia producer. McKee worked for two Canadian development agencies, Canadian University Service Overseas and International Development Research Centre (IDRC); UNICEF; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland; Academy for Educational Development and FHI 360, Washington, DC, where he was director of a communication project with 150 staff and a large budget.
During his career, Neill McKee lived for four years in Malaysia, four years in Bangladesh, seven years in Kenya and Uganda, and his last overseas posting was in Moscow during 2004–2007. Besides that, he traveled to about 80 countries on short-term assignments.
"I started to write draft stories for this book when I retired from my main career in 2013. I wrote my three memoirs—Kid on the Go!, Finding Myself in Borneo, and Guns and Gods in My Genes—simultaneously," the author says.
His first, Finding Myself in Borneo, has won a Bronze Ippy Award for Best Regional NonFiction and is a winner of the NM-AZ Award. It is about how McKee started his career as a volunteer teacher and filmmaker on an exotic island in Southeast Asia.
In Guns and Gods in My Genes, Neill McKee takes the reader through 400 years and 15,000 miles of an on-the-road adventure.
Kid on the Go! Memoir of My Childhood and Youth is McKee's third work of creative nonfiction. It is a standalone prequel to Finding Myself in Borneo. In this memoir, he takes readers on a humorous and poignant journey through his childhood, early adolescence, and teenage years from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s in the small industrially-polluted town of Elmira in southern Ontario.
Neill McKee is also the author of several books, articles, and manuals on communication for development and the producer/director of many films, animated films, videos, and multimedia initiatives.
He studied creative nonfiction at the University of New Mexico and joined Southwest Writers in Albuquerque.
Neill McKee currently lives in New Mexico.
Photo credit: www.neillmckeeauthor.com