Mark Abley is a poet, journalist, travel writer, essayist and editor. Born in 1955 in England, he grew up mostly in Saskatchewan and Alberta. Between 1975 and 1978 he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. His early freelance career saw him become a contributing editor of Maclean's and Saturday Night, as well as a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, CBC Radio's Ideas, and The Canadian Forum. He worked for sixteen years at the Montreal Gazette as a feature writer, book-review editor and literary columnist; during those years he published two books of poetry, the text of an illustrated children's story, and two non-fiction books. He has been a writer, editor and guest lecturer in the Creative Non-Fiction program at the Banff Centre for the Arts. In 2003 he returned to freelance writing. His non-fiction book "Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages" became a bestseller in the UK and was translated into several languages. In 2005 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to research a book on language change and the future. That book will be published in the spring of 2008. Mark Abley lives with his wife, two daughters and two cats in a suburb of Montreal.
PUBLICATIONS:
Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2003.
Ghost Cat. Toronto: Groundwood Books, 2001.
Stories From the Ice Storm. (ed.) Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999.
