His short story collection, Country of Cold, won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in 2003.
Kevin Patterson was born on December 27, 1964, in Kapuskasing, Ontario and raised in Selkirk, Manitoba.
He put himself through medical school at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg by enlisting in the Canadian army.
In 1999, Patterson published The Water in Between, a travel memoir of his sailing expedition in the Pacific Ocean.
Talk to Me Like My Father, Patterson's account of spending six weeks as a doctor with NATO forces in Afghanistan in the winter of 2007, was published in the July–August issue of Mother Jones magazine in the U.S.[3] The article created news headlines in Canada because of Patterson's graphic description of the dying moments of Nova Scotia-born soldier Kevin Megeney.