A regular broadcaster and critic on television and radio, Michael Ignatieff has hosted many programs including Voice; the BBC's arts program The Late Show; and the award-winning series Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, which examined the issue of nationalism in the late twentieth century. Ignatieff has contributed to newspapers such as The Globe and Mail and The New York Times Magazine. His novel Scar Tissue was short-listed for the Booker Prize; The Russian Album, a history of his family’s experience in nineteenth-century Russia, won the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction and the British Royal Society of Literature’s Heinemann Prize; and his biography of Isaiah Berlin was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Non-Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Ignatieff has held academic posts at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Harvard University, the University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia, the University of London, the London School of Economics, and the University of California.