Charles William Foran CM (born August 2, 1960) is a Canadian writer in Toronto, Ontario.

Foran was born in August 1960 in Toronto, Ontario to a Franco-Ontarian mother and a father from an Ottawa Irish family.

In 1988 they relocated to Beijing, China, where Foran taught at a university and witnessed the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.

As well as making documentaries for the CBC Radio program Ideas on subjects ranging from Asian martial arts cinema to Indian writing, he was on the organising committee for the Hong Kong International Literary Festival.

Mordecai Richler: The Last of the Wild Jews, a documentary film co-written by Foran and director Francine Pelletier, first aired on BRAVO TV in December 2010.

On November 15, 2011, the Globe and Mail declared Mordecai: The Life and Times "probably the single most awarded book of any genre in the history of Canadian literature."

In March 2011 Foran's short interpretive biography Maurice Richard, about the ice hockey player, was published by Penguin, as part of their Extraordinary Canadians series.

The novel returns to contemporary Asia, the setting of two earlier works of fiction, to explore the digital age through the eyes of a teenage girl.

In April 2023, after nearly a decade of publishing only journalism and essays, including on post-nationalism in The Guardian and on a writer in mid-career in Canadian Notes & Queries, Foran released his twelfth book, the philosophical memoir Just Once, No More: On Fathers, Sons, and Who We Are Until We Are No Longer, published by Knopf Canada.

A former president of PEN Canada from 2011 until September 2013, he is a senior fellow at Massey College and an adjunct professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto.