Mark Abley

Mark Abley (born 13 May 1955) is a Canadian poet, journalist, editor and non-fiction writer. His latest book of non-fiction is Conversations with a Dead Man: The Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott, published in November 2013.

Born in Warwickshire, England, he moved to Canada as a small boy and grew up in Lethbridge, Alberta and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He attended the University of Saskatchewan from which he won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1975. He won prizes for his poetry while a student at St John's College, Oxford, and began to write full-time after moving to Toronto in 1978. He has been a contributing editor of both Maclean's and Saturday Night magazines, and a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. In 1996 he won Canada's National Newspaper Award for critical writing.

Since 1983 Abley has lived in the Montreal area. For sixteen years he worked as a feature writer and book-review editor at the Montreal Gazette. He returned to freelance writing in 2003, though he continues to write columns on language issues for the Gazette. In 2009 he joined McGill-Queen's University Press as a part-time acquisition editor. He became the first-ever writer-in-residence for the city of Pointe-Claire in 2010-11.

He has written four books of poetry, two children's books, and several books of non-fiction. The best-known is probably Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages (2003), in which Abley showcases people and cultures whose languages are at risk of vanishing in an era of globalization. Abley poses the question: should anybody care that thousands of languages are at risk? Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages was short-listed for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal and the Pearson Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize. It was translated into French, Spanish and Japanese, and was largely responsible for Abley being awarded the LiberPress Prize for international authors in Girona, Spain, in October 2009. Abley has given lectures at Oxford University, Cambridge University, Ohio State University, McGill University, and elsewhere.

...
Wikipedia