Mark Abley

Mark Abley (born 13 May, 1955) is a Canadian poet, journalist, editor and non-fiction writer.

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.

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 for both the Gazette and the Toronto Star.

He has written three books of poetry, one children's book, and several books of non-fiction. The best-known is probably Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages (2003), which 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. In 2005 Abley was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. His next book, The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English, will appear in 2008.

Abley has edited several books, including When Earth Leaps Up by Anne Szumigalski. He is Szumigalski's literary executor. He has taught for the Quebec Writers' Federation and the Banff Centre for the Arts.

Selected Bibliography

Beyond Forget: Rediscovering the Prairies (literary travel), 1986.

Blue Sand, Blue Moon (poetry), 1988.

Glasburyon (poetry), 1994.

Ghost Cat (children's book), 2001.

Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages (literary travel, cultural polemic), 2003.

The Silver Palace Restaurant (poetry), 2005.

The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches From the Future of English (forthcoming book about language change), 2008.