Fonds P182 - Mark Abley fonds

Mark Abley is a non-fiction writer, journalist, travel writer, and poet. He was born in Leamington, England, on May 13, 1955, and grew up in Ontario, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. He now lives in Montreal.
Abley studied literature at the University of Saskatchewan, obtaining a BA in 1975. He continued his studies as Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, where he completed a second BA with first-class honours in 1978 and a Master’s degree in 1983, both in literature.
After his studies, Mark Abley and his wife Ann moved to Montreal, where he began to work as a freelance writer. His first book, Beyond Forget : Rediscovering the Prairies, was published in 1986.
With the birth of his first child in 1987, Abley joined the Montreal Gazette, where he worked as a feature writer, book-review editor and literary columnist for the following sixteen years.
During his career at the Montreal Gazette, Abley won the National Newspaper Award for critical writing (1996) and was nominated for a National Newspaper Award for international reporting. In 1995, he received a “Dateline Hong Kong” fellowship sponsored by the Canadian Association of Journalists. In 1997, he received a Maclean-Hunter Fellowship in arts journalism from the Banff Centre for the Arts.
Mark Abley left The Gazette and returned to freelance writing in 2003 with the publication of Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Language. In 2005, Abley was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used to write The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches From the Future of English, published in 2008, as the second of three books about language. Abley also wrote a memoir of his father, The Organist : Fugues, Fatherhood, and a Fragile Mind, and a book about Indigenous and colonial history, Conversations with a Dead Man : The Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott. In his book Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail, published in 2023, Abley is reflecting back on his travels through Asia as a young man, in spring 1978. Abley also wrote the text of a children’s picture book, Ghost Cat.
In 2022 Mark Abley received an honorary doctorate from the University of Saskatchewan for his contributions to the literary community.

Abley was a participating member of poets’ workshops during his time in Oxford and later in Montreal. He has published three books of poetry, Blue Sand, Blue Moon (1988), Glasburyon (1994), and The Silver Palace Restaurant (2005), as well as the chapbook Dissolving Bedrock (2001). He received the QSPELL awards for poetry in 1989 and 1995.

Mark Abley has taught writing and literature at various writers’ workshops, at the Banff Centre for the Arts, at the English Department of Concordia University, and he has guest lectured in Concordia’s Journalism program. Abley has also served on juries for the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des letters du Québec, and the Quebec Writers Federation, of which he is a member. He is also a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada, the Canadian Association of Rhodes Scholars, and PEN Canada.