Mark Abley


Mark Abley is a Canadian poet, journalist, editor and non-fiction writer. His writings show an interest in endangered languages. He published a memoir, The Organist, in 2019.

Early life

Born in Warwickshire, England, Mark Abley moved to Canada as a small boy and grew up in Lethbridge, Alberta and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. His father Harry was an organist who played in churches and cinemas; he also taught the pipe organ. His struggle with depression is a major theme of The Organist, Mark's memoir of his father.
Abley 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 frequent contributor to The Times Literary Supplement.

Career

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. In 1996 he won Canada's National Newspaper Award for critical writing; he was previously shortlisted for the award in 1992 in the category of international reporting for a series of articles about the Horn of Africa. He returned to freelance writing in 2003, though he continued to write the "Watchwords" columns on language issues for the Gazette. In 2009 he joined McGill-Queen's University Press as a part-time acquisition editor. He served as the first 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 non-fiction books. Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, which describes people and cultures whose languages are at risk of vanishing in an era of globalization, 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, Japanese and Latvian. In 2009, Abley was awarded the LiberPress Prize for international authors in Girona, Spain.
Abley has lectured at Oxford University, Cambridge University, Ohio State University, McGill University, Queen's University, the University of Toronto and elsewhere. He delivered the annual Priestly Lecture at the University of Lethbridge and gave the opening address to a conference of the Association of American University Presses.
In 2005 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for research into language change. His book The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English appeared in May 2008 and was reviewed in The Times, and 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. He has also written the text of a picture book for young children, Ghost Cat.
Abley has edited several books, including When Earth Leaps Up and A Woman Clothed in Words by Anne Szumigalski; he was Szumigalski's literary executor. Over the years he has led workshops for the Quebec Writers' Federation, the Maritime Writers' Workshop and the Banff Centre for the Arts. His magazine journalism has appeared in The Walrus, Canadian Geographic, Canada's History and many other publications, and he was shortlisted for the President's Medal at the National Magazine Awards.
In 2013, Abley published Conversations with a Dead Man: The Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott. Scott was a poet who ran the Department of Indian Affairs for many years and is sometimes accused of cultural genocide.
In 2015 Coteau Books published The Tongues of Earth, a volume of his new and selected poems, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Fred Cogswell Award for literary excellence.

Selected bibliography