Mark Abley

Mark Abley writes the "Watchwords" column on language matters in the Books pages of The Gazette. He is also the author or editor of a dozen books, two of them dealing with questions of language.

Mark grew up in western Canada and attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. After working as a freelance writer, he joined The Gazette in 1987. He won the National Newspaper Award in critical writing, and was shortlisted for the NNA in international reporting. In 2005 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

His book "Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages" (2003) was named a New York Times "Notable Book" and a San Francisco Chronicle "Best Book of the Year." It was translated into French, Spanish and Japanese. Mark's latest book, "The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches From the Future of English," appears in Canada, Britain and the United States in the spring of 2008.

E-mail : markabley@hotmail.com

Julian Armstrong

Julian Armstrong, food editor of The Gazette, considers the food beat the richest on the paper because everybody eats and most people have strong views about food.

A Montrealer by adoption - she came here from Toronto more than 40 years ago - she considers the city a headquarters for the finest, most varied food in North America. Her favourite topic is Quebec regional cuisine, about which she wrote a cookbook called A Taste of Quebec (Wiley, 2001) and she is a fervent admirer of the new breed of Quebec chefs who continually raise the standard of cuisine based on fresh, local foods.

Other topics are food marketing, nutrition, and such food safety scares as mad cow disease and pollutants in farm-raised salmon, and she always tries to present the story fairly and to respond to consumer concerns. And yes, she eats beef and salmon without fear.

She has a University of Toronto degree in modern history and has taken countless cooking courses. Previously food editor of The Montreal Star until its demise in 1979, she has always considered herself a food reporter rather than a culinary expert. The title she chuckles over is one given her years ago by a reader: "Is that the cook page lady?" he asked.

Her latest goal is to encourage everyone who eats mostly ready-made food to try simple cooking and thereby discover it's one of the most creative activities of daily life.

E-mail : jarmstrong@thegazette.canwest.com

Henry Aubin

Henry Aubin writes about the city-region of Montreal. Since joining The Gazette in 1973, he has been an investigative reporter, editorial writer and, since 2001, full-time columnist.

He received a B.A. in English at Harvard and studied law for a year at Universit Laval on a Canadian Bar Association fellowship for journalists. He is a former reporter with the Washington Post.

Aubin has been vice-president of the Fdration professionnelle des journalistes du Quebec and co-founder of the Centre for Investigative Journalism (precursor of the Canadian Association of Journalists).

He has won three National Newspaper Awards (twice for enterprise reporting and once for editorial writing).

He is the author of City for Sale (1977), a bestseller on Montreal land ownership, and The Rescue of Jerusalem: The Alliance between Hebrews and Africans in 701 BC (2002), which received the Quebec Writers' Federation Award for non-fiction and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for history. His newest book is Who's Afraid of Demergers? The Straight Goods on Qubec's Megacities (2004).

He and his wife have four grown children.

E-mail : haubin@thegazette.canwest.com

Janet Bagnall

Janet Bagnall is an editorial writer and columnist with The Gazette. Her column appears Fridays, commenting on issues of social justice and human rights.

She is a graduate of the University of Toronto (B.A., B.Ed., M.A.) and the University of Western Ontario (M.A. in journalism). Born in Charlottetown, P.E.I., she lived in Quebec (Valleyfield), India, Chile and Ontario, finally returning to Quebec in 1978 to join The Gazette as a news reporter. She joined the editorial board in 1997, after working as a lifestyle-section editor (pre-parenthood) and feature writer.

She was a finalist in 1998 for a National Newspaper Award in editorial writing.

E-mail : jbagnall@thegazette.canwest.com

Jill Barker

The Gazette's fitness columnist since 1997, Jill Barker has tackled everything from the Zen of yoga to our "absession" with abs.

Certified as a personal trainer and group fitness leader and the owner of a degree in recreation and leisure studies from Concordia University, she has 15 years experience teaching fitness, organizing fitness conferences and coaching master's swimming.

When she's not running or swimming, Jill coordinates the fitness program at McGill University where she is also a lecturer in the Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education.

In addition to sharing the latest fitness trends with readers, Jill writes about kids in sport, nutrition and sports medicine.

E-mail : jbarker@videotron.ca

David Bird

David Bird has been writing regularly about birds and bird-watching for The Gazette for 20 years. His columns often feature tips on how to enjoy our feathered friends, but he especially relishes popularizing the latest scientific findings on them.

E-mail : bird@nrs.mcgill.ca

Mike Boone

Mike Boone has been a Gazette columnist since 1980. He wrote about radio and television before moving to the City pages in 2000.

Born in Saint John, N.B. in 1948, Boone grew up in the Park Extension section of Montreal. He attended legendary Baron Byng High School and graduated from McGill University with a B.A. in English Literature.

Before joing The Gazette, Boone was a Montreal Star sportswriter. He has also written about pop music, covered Montreal Symphony Orchestra tours of Europe and Asia and won The Gazette's Joan Fraser prize for opinion writing.

Boone has a teenage daughter and two Boston terriers. They live in the suburbs, where Boone strives to reinforce the stereotype of a beer-swilling oaf who spends his free time watching sports on TV.

E-mail : mboone@thegazette.canwest.com

Bill Brownstein

Bill Brownstein has been a columnist for the last 21 years at the Montreal Gazette, commenting on city and cultural life in Montreal. He was born, bred and educated in Montreal. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology from McGill University, which immediately led to a gig washing dishes at the student union of said university.

He has made two documentary films, Bill Lee: A Profile of a Pitcher, about former Montreal Expos pitcher Bill "Spaceman" Lee and Skating on Thin Ice, about the nomadic life of two journeymen hockey players in the NHL. However, Brownstein jumped into journalism - initially, film criticism - when he learned there was more money to be made in destroying movies than making them, and absolutely nothing to be made writing poetry. And he should know: he penned the volume of poetry, Live at the Apollo, which while well-reviewed didn’t do Harry Potter-like numbers.

He is the author of Sex Carnival, a whimsical peek into the wide world of sex, and Down the Tube, a frightening account of the week he was forced to spend in TV hell - for having too much fun doing the first book. He is also co-author and co-editor of The Great Canadian Character Anthology. Brownstein is the author of Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen: The Story, a witty yet insightful probe into the legendary Montreal deli. The book was released in 2006. The French version of Brownstein’s take on Schwartz’s came out in 2008. And Bowser and Blue will be transforming his deli saga into Schwartz’s: The Musical, which will be presented on the Centaur Theatre stage in 2009.
 
Brownstein’s latest book, Montreal 24: Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a City, is an around-the-clock odyssey through the city that never sleeps.

E-mail : bbrownst@thegazette.canwest.com

Jay Bryan

Jay Bryan is The Gazette's Business and Economics Columnist.

He holds an honors B.A. in Government from Harvard University and has been the winner of an award for enterprise reporting from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and a finalist in Canada's National Newspaper Awards.

His recent professional activities included teaching business journalism and opinion writing at Concordia University and developing a seminar for business journalists on behalf of the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago.

E-mail : jbryan@thegazette.canwest.com

Walter Buchignani

Walter Buchignani, a graduate of Concordia's journalism program, has been at The Gazette since 1987, first as a reporter, then feature writer, now copy editor.

As a sideline, he writes regularly about one of his passions - Formula One auto racing. His columns began to appear in 2000, the same year that Michael Schumacher embarked on his string of five straight world championships with Ferrari, breaking a 20-year drought at the Italian stable.

Buchignani, of Italian descent, claims this is pure coincidence. Read him in The Gazette on the Friday of every Grand Prix weekend.

E-mail : wbuchignani@thegazette.canwest.com

Paul Carbray

Paul Carbray is a former assistant sports editor and a commentator on world soccer for The Gazette.

Despite his interest in soccer, Paul was born and brought up in Canada. A native of Vancouver, he attended grade school, high school and university in Montreal, After leaving university at Loyola College, where he held several posts on the student newspaper, he became a journalist, working on newspapers in Nelson, B.C., Penticton, B.C. and Vancouver, along with the Canadian Press wire service in Edmonton and Vancouver.

He joined The Gazette in 1981.

E-mail : pcarbray@thegazette.canwest.com

Doug Camilli

Yes, "Doug Camilli" is a pseudonym. No, we're not telling his real name, because he has a day job at The Gazette. He uses the fake name and the back-of-head photo because - hey, would you put your real name on that kind of stuff?

He got "Doug Camilli" from a 1960s major-league baseball catcher, a career .199 hitter. Our Camilli, 55, says he, like Jimmy Buffett, is "growing older but not up."

Born in Hamilton Ont, grew up in Windsor Ont., studied at the University of Windsor, worked for the Windsor Star, moved to Montreal and The Gazette in 1976, and has serially held half the jobs in The Gazette's newsroom since then.

He's been doing this column for more than 20 years and is quick to point out that there's no original reporting in it, except maybe the "overheard in a Bishop St. bar" items.

Doug likes spicy food, baseball, Jimmy Buffett, Orchestra Baobab, military history, tequila, and Rachel Hunter, not necessarily in that order.

E-mail : camilli@thegazette.canwest.com

Jennifer Campbell

A graduate of McGill University's law school, Jennifer Campbell learned the Montreal social scene as a professional fundraiser and event planner, and spent a number of years working with the YM-YWHA, where she launched its annual scholarship golf tournament. Campbell is also a fashion journalist, who appears regularly on Global Television's This Morning Live.

Lesley Chesterman

Lesley Chesterman has been the fine-dining critic of The Montreal Gazette since 1999. She also contributes Critic's Notebook, focusing on food and wine trends, and restaurant etiquette, as well as a question and answer column, Eater's Digest, to the Gazette's Food Section.

Prior to her career in food writing, Ms. Chesterman attended the Institut de Tourisme et d'Hotellerie du Quebec for three years before working as a professional pastry chef in Quebec and in France.

Her 2002 dining out guide, Flavourville, was on the best seller list for over 70 weeks. The newest version of the guide, Flavourville 2003-2004, was launched in December, 2003.

Peggy Curran

Peggy Curran is the University Life reporter and columnist for The Gazette.

A Montrealer by birth and conviction, she earned an Honours B.A. (History and English) at Concordia University and a Master's in Journalism at the University of Western Ontario. After a brief stint at The Montreal Star -- she holds the dubious distinction of being the last reporter hired before the ship went down in 1979 -- she joined The Gazette in April 1980.

She has covered floods and fires, papal visits and biker trials, the return of The Sopranos and the excruciatingly slow death of the Meech Lake Accord. She spent four years in The Gazette's Ottawa bureau before returning home to write the city column for seven years.

She wrote about radio and television for two years before taking on new duties writing about Montreal's universities. She roots for les Canadiens in good times and in bad.

E-mail : pcurran@thegazette.canwest.com

Paul Delean

Paul Delean covers personal finance and small business for the Montreal Gazette, which he joined in 1981.

A graduate of York University, he's worked at five Canadian newspapers, starting with the Timmins Daily Press in 1975.

E-mail : pdelean@thegazette.canwest.com

Pat Donnelly

Pat Donnelly is currently the Montreal Gazette's first ever full-time literary critic but she's best known as the paper's longest-running Theatre Critic. She began writing theatre reviews for the Gazette in 1983 and became the official Montreal Gazette theatre critic in 1987. In the fall of 2001 she became The Gazette Books Critic.

Born, raised and educated in Saskatchewan (B.A. at the University of Saskatchewan), she took up acting in high school and continued at the Saskatoon University drama department.

Donnelly worked at McLean-Hunter in Toronto for a year, spent two years traveling in Europe and studied French at La Sorbonne in Paris. In 1975, she moved to Montreal, where she sold perfume at Ogilvy's department store and continued her theatre studies at McGill. In 1981, she earned a McGill Diploma in Education.

Over the years, she has worked at many jobs, including teaching English as a second language at McGill and teaching drama at the Montreal Children's Theatre with Dorothy Davis and Violet Walters. In the theatre she has had practical experience as an actor, director, playwright and producer. She's also the proud mother of a talented, self-supporting, adult daughter.

A lifelong history buff, Donnelly owns a circa 1912 church in her home town in Saskatchewan and has presented concerts of Celtic and Classical music there each summer since 1996.

In the fall of 2001, she was a Vision party candidate for borough councillor in Westmount during the first election of the newly merged city of Montreal. She lost but got a great story out of the experience.

E-mail : thegazette.canwest.com

Denise Duguay

Denise Duguay is a writer and copy editor in The Gazette Arts & Life Department who contributes regularly to the TV blog Inside the Box (montrealgazette.com/tv) and covers travel-related programming in TV Explorer, a monthly column in the Gazette's Saturday Travel section.

Her love of television and travel comes naturally. Born and raised in Winnipeg, she soon learned that you either cover up against the cold and/or mosquitoes or you travel often to less harsh locales. In between trips, you hunker down in front of the tube, to which she bonded at a dangerously young age with episodes of Batman and The Twilight Zone. In between episodes of St. Elsewhere, she majored in journalism in the Creative Communications program at Winnipeg's Red River Community College.

After two years at the Brandon Sun, she made the leap back to hometown paper the Winnipeg Sun, where she moved from news to entertainment reporting, serving as the Sun's television critic for five years.

Destiny brought her to Montreal where she concentrates on suppressing her Prairie sensibility and making quality time for her television friends, whom she knows are not real.

Since moving east, she is delirious to report that New York City, as hoped, really is the best city in the world -- outside Winnipeg and, yes, Montreal. She has, however, managed to also travel further afield on occasion, including: much of the rest of Canada and the U.S., St. Lucia, Mexico, England, Ireland, Israel, Jordan, Austria, Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic and, most recently, Paris.

Drop her a note at dduguay@thegazette.canwest.com

Andrew Fazekas

Keeping his eyes peeled to the starry heavens, Andrew Fazekas pens the Stargazing column for the Montreal Gazette. Writing about the wonders of the night sky, he guides skywatchers to upcoming celestial events and takes his readers to the edge of the universe - pricey telescopes not required.

A science writer and lecturer, Andrew regularly contributes to newspapers and magazines and has worked with the Canadian Space Agency in helping popularize the nation's space science programs. He has given countless 'out-of-this-worl'presentations to schools and libraries over the past 15 years and currently teaches backyard astronomy at Vanier College.

As a director at the Montreal Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada he organizes public outreach events in the community and regularly provides space news commentary for local television and radio.

E-mail : skyfeedback@hotmail.com

Red Fisher

Red Fisher started his journalism career with The Montreal Star on March 15, 1954. He was that newspaper's hockey writer and columnist, and its sports editor from 1969 until September, 1979 when The Star closed.

He joined The Gazette as sports editor the following month and served in that capacity for several years.

Fisher is in his 49th season of covering the Montreal Canadiens. He has won the National Newspaper Award for sportswriting in 1971 and 1991, and has been nominated for the NNA on two other occasions. He was also the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from Sports Media Canada in 1999.

E-mail : rfisher@thegazette.canwest.com

Josh Freed

Josh Freed writes a humorous Saturday column about everything from potholes to politics to the pigeons who've taken over his back balcony in Montreal.

In both 2002 and 1997 he won the National Newspaper Award for best Canadian columnist, while a collection of his columns also won the Leacock Prize for humor.

Between columns, Josh is an award-winning documentary-maker whose films have taken him from Mongolia and Russia to the North Pole. He has also written several best-selling books. Josh is directionally-disabled, calligraphy-challenged and hair-impaired, as his regular readers know. But he believes that he who laughs, lasts.

Eva Friede

Eva Friede is fashion editor at The Gazette. She considers fashion to be a window on society, a way of expressing identity and a lot of frivolous fun. She made the leap from editor of the Review section at The Gazette to professional shopper, stylist and trend-watcher after an astute editor looked up from his screen and noticed a wannabe fashionista.

After graduating from McGill University, she worked at newspapers in Montreal, Edmonton and Toronto before returning home in 1988 to work at The Gazette.

Her favourite colour is black.

E-mail : efriede@thegazette.canwest.com

Bernie Goedhart

Born in Indonesia of Dutch parents, Bernie Goedhart had to jetttison most of her childhood books when the family emigrated to Holland and later to Canada, which may help explain her interest in children's literature as an adult.

She graduated from the University of Alberta and worked for the Edmonton Journal and Canadian Press before starting a family of her own. In 1977, when the first of two sons was about 2, she was approached by her former employer to review children's books and has written about childrens' literature ever since for various publications, including The Gazette.

E-mail : bgoedhart@thegazette.canwest.com

John Griffin

John Griffin is the film critic at the Montreal Gazette. He also writes about music, and popular culture. Before joining the Gazette in 1980, the native Montrealer attended school in that city and - between 1964 and 1967 - in England, during the full flower of British pop culture.

E-mail : jgriffin@thegazette.canwest.com