Mark Abley

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

Life
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 16 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 is the first-ever writer-in-residence for the city of Pointe-Claire in 2010-11.

He has written three 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), 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. He has also given lectures at Oxford University, Cambridge University, Ohio State University and elsewhere.

His book The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English appeared in May 2008. It was praised as "fascinating" in The Times (London), and hailed by William Safire in The New York Times. In August 2009 Abley published a children's book about words and their origins, Camp Fossil Eyes.

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.

Recognition
In 2005 Abley was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for research into language change.

He was awarded the LiberPress Prize in Girona, Spain, in October 2009.

Poetry

 * Blue Sand, Blue Moon (poetry), 1988.
 * Glasburyon (poetry), 1994.
 * The Silver Palace Restaurant (poetry), 2005.

Non-fiction

 * Beyond Forget: Rediscovering the Prairies (literary travel), 1986.
 * Ghost Cat (children's book), 2001.
 * Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages (literary travel, cultural polemic), 2003.
 * The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches From the Future of English (analysis of language change and its implications), 2008.
 * Camp Fossil Eyes: Digging for the Origins of Words (children's book), 2009.