Mark Abley is a Rhodes Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, a husband and a father of two. He grew up in Western Canada, spent several years in England, and has lived in the Montreal area since the early 1980s. His first love was poetry, and he has published four collections. But he is best known for his many books of nonfiction, notably Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages and The Organist: Fugues, Fatherhood, and a Fragile Mind. His new book, Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail, describes his travels across west and south Asia in the spring of 1978. Mark kept detailed journals during his three-month journey, allowing him to recreate his experiences from the standpoint of a much older man. In 2022 Mark was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Saskatchewan for his contributions to the literary community.