Mark Abley is a nonfiction writer, poet, and journalist. His many books include The Organist: Fugues, Fatherhood, and a Fragile Mind, a memoir of his father; Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages and The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English, among other books on language; Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail, a reflective travel memoir based on his own forty-five-year-old journals; and several poetry collections and children's books. His work has won international praise and has been translated into five languages. He lives in Montreal.