Mark Abley

Mark Abley’s Spoken Here: Travels With Threatened Languages was listed as a “book of the year” by The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Discover magazine. It won acclaim from publications as far afield as Capetown, London and Hong Kong, and is being translated into French, Spanish and Catalan. “Books may routinely be described as important,” said a reviewer in the Glasgow Sunday Herald, “but Spoken Here truly is.”

Abley, who was a Rhodes Scholar from Saskatchewan, is the author or editor of ten books of poetry and prose. A former contributing editor of both Saturday Night and Maclean’s, he wrote features for many years at the Montreal Gazette, won a National Newspaper Award for critical writing and was short-listed for international reporting.

Along the way Abley discovered the recipe by which the great artist and poet William Blake made his own white paint. Abley is now working on a book about the future of language.