Jason Schoonover is a writer, adventurer, expedition leader, ethnologist, archaeologist, paleontologist, canoeist, naturalist and a photographer. He’s a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, Fellow Emeritus ’86, Stefansson Medalist, Citation of Merit awardee, and on the Honor Roll of The Explorers Club, and the recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal for his contribution to exploration in Canada. He was brought up on farms, villages and towns in Saskatchewan.
Following university (Simon Fraser, English and History, 1970, Burnaby), he launched a multi-media career as a disk jockey, and expanded into writing, directing and producing in radio, TV, stage, newspapers and magazines, including as a columnist. His largest stage production was writing, directing and producing Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s 80th birthday party gala in 1975, an extravaganza involving over 300 performers and personnel. He founded Schoonover Properties and invested in Saskatoon real estate.
Since 1977 he’s been gainfully unemployed and began exploring in earnest. On his first solo around the world, stringing travel as a photo-journalist to Canadian and U.S. dailies, he discovered a new and fascinating career in Asia—anthropological collecting for museums internationally. He moved part time to Bangkok in 1982.
His curiosity has led him into interesting nooks.
He has been on approximately 100 expeditions, including almost 50 as Team Leader. This included 12 with the late Capt. Norm Baker, Thor Heyerdahl’s First Mate on the Ra and Tigris reed boat voyages; several 20-person dinosaur bone hunting expeditions with renowned paleontologist Dr. Philip Currie as his Field Leader; fixed a Sri Lankan Devil Dance shoot for Survivorman Les Stroud; explored South and Southeast Asian jungles and the Himalayas piecing together anthropological collections for museums worldwide; and excavated Paleo and Neolithic caves along Thailand’s River Kwai with Sir Rod Beattie which resulted in the building of the Hintok Camp Museum. With Beattie he also explored much of the Thai side of the infamous WW-II Death Railway.
He has also been charged by a bull elephant, caught between a mother bear and her cub, dived on shipwrecks, and been around the world several times. His real life of adventure crossed over into fiction with the publication in 1988 of his first adventure novel, Seal-Bantam’s The Bangkok Collection, which became the Bantam international paperback bestseller Thai Gold the following year. His non-fiction Adventurous Dreams, Adventurous Lives was an award winner. All his books, fiction and non-fiction, are in the adventure field.
He was profiled in Jerry’s Hopkins’ Bangkok Babylon: The Real-Life Exploits of Bangkok’s Legendary Expatriates is often Stranger than Fiction, and featured in Jim McCormick and Maryann Karinch’s Business Lessons from the Edge: Learn How Extreme Athletes Use Intelligent Risk Taking to Succeed in Business.
Jason splits his year between Thailand and Canada. You can guess which seasons he spends where. His consort, the Imperial Dragon Lady Madame Su Hattori, has kindly been enduring the unendurable since 1988.