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Mark Steven Morton

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Canadian writer
Mark Morton
Mark Morton, 2022Mark Morton, 2022
BornDecember 31, 1963
Weyburn, Saskatchewan, Canada
EducationPhD Early Modern English Literature
Alma materUniversity of Toronto, PhD 1992
Website
markmorton.notion.site

Mark Morton (born 1963) is a Canadian author. He is best known for non-fiction books and articles on language, history, and food culture. He is also the co-founder of the Winnipeg International Writers Festival and former writer and broadcaster for CBC Radio One.

Biography

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Morton was born in Weyburn, Saskatchewan and grew up on a small grain and cattle farm in that province. He attended the University of Regina for a BA and then the University of Toronto for an MA and PhD in Early Modern English Literature, focusing on The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser.

Awards

  • Nominee for the 1997 Julia Child Award in the Food Reference/Technical category (Calphalon Award)
  • Recipient of the 2003 Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction

Publications

Morton has written four non-fiction books on topics pertaining to language, history, and food culture: Cupboard Love; The End; The Lover's Tongue; and Cooking with Shakespeare. From 2001 to 2012, he was also a regular contributor to Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, in which he published more than 50 articles. Morton has written one novel: The Headmasters.

Cupboard Love

Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities (Bain & Cox, 1996) explores the etymological origins of more than a 1000 English words pertaining to food, cooking, and eating. The entry for "pomegranate," for example, explains how that word derives from the same Latin source as "grenade" and "granite," while the entry for "souffle" shows how that word is related to "flatulence" through a shared Proto-Indo-European root that meant "to blow."

In 2003, Cupboard Love was translated into Czech and published by Volvox Globator (Prague) as Nadívaný pštros. A second and expanded edition was published by Insomniac Press in 2004. It was one of three books nominated for a 1996 Julia Child Cookbook Award in the Food Reference/Technical Category (Calphalon Award).

The Atlantic commented that the book "lays out the histories of hundreds of food-related terms as deftly and completely as any casual reader could wish." Cupboard Love was also reviewed or cited in The Globe and Mail, Choice Reviews, The London Free Press, The Edmonton Journal, The Hamilton Spectator, The Winnipeg Free Press, and Publishers Weekly.

The End

The End: Closing Words for a Millennium (Bain & Cox, 1999, co-authored with Gail Noble) draws from hundreds of primary sources such as newspaper articles, letters, diaries, poems, plays, and sheet music to explore how people living at the ends of previous centuries celebrated or thought about the end of their own century (or the beginning of their new one). The Toronto Star commented that "Although most of The End is a sort of narrated anthology of centuries-old newspaper articles, letters, diaries and the like, Morton and Noble's introduction is a short history in all things millennial.

The Lover's Tongue

The Lover's Tongue: A Merry Romp Through the Language of Love and Sex (Insomniac Press, 2003) explores the origins of English words and phrases pertaining to love and sex. In the UK it was published by Atlantic Books as Dirty Words: The Story of Sex Talk. The Guardian noted that "no other book that offers such a compendious and up-to-date trove of erotic etymology.” The Lover's Tongue was also reviewed or cited in The Times (London), The Globe and Mail, and The National Post,

Cooking with Shakespeare

Cooking with Shakespeare (Greenwood Press, 2008) explores food culture in Shakespeare's England: what was eaten, how it was cooked and served, how different classes ate different foods, customs at the dining table, and so on. It include sixteenth-century recipes in facsimile and in modern renderings. Choice Reviews noted that Cooking with Shakespeare "ventures beyond literature and cookery into history, etymology, and sciences. Thorough, exemplary, logical, and unflinchingly authentic, the volume is a labor of love and thoughtful scholarship."

The Headmasters

The Headmasters (Shadowpaw Press, 2024) is a young adult, dystopian novel set in northern Ontario. A review in the Winnipeg Free Press noted that "The Headmasters is a worthy companion to books such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids."

Broadcasting

Between 1993 and 2005, Morton wrote and broadcast more than a hundred columns pertaining to language and pop culture for CBC Radio One, initially on CBC Winnipeg's morning show and later on the national weekly program Definitely Not the Opera. He also wrote and broadcast an hour-long documentary about the last day of the nineteenth century.

References

  1. "15 Years of Thin Air | The Winnipeg International Writers Festival". Retrieved 2023-09-07.
  2. ^ "33 Nominees in running for this year's Julia Child Cookbook Honors", Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, pp. C6, 20 March 1997
  3. Riegel, Christian (2007). Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twenty-First-Century Canadian Writers. Thomson Gale. p. 316.
  4. "Search Results for "mark morton"". ucpress.edu. University of California Press. Retrieved 2023-07-02.
  5. Morton, Mark (20 October 2003), "Nadívaný pštros", Volvox Globator, retrieved June 25, 2023
  6. Kummer, Corby (January 1997). "Corby's Table". theatlantic.com. Retrieved 2023-06-27.
  7. Roberts, David (1996-12-21), Stories of trake and ermal will make readers catillate, Globe and Mail, p. D14, retrieved June 26, 2023
  8. Miller, P. (July 1997). "Cupboard love: a dictionary of culinary curiosities". Choice Reviews. 34 (11). doi:10.5860/CHOICE.34-6031.
  9. "Call it a cupboard cookout", London Free Press, 13 March 2003
  10. "Does anyone really know how to cook brussels sprouts?", Edmonton Journal, 15 February 2012
  11. Fazari, Lori (2 December 2004). "What's cookin' for Christmas". The Hamilton Spectator.
  12. "Barry, Pearson turn pens to kids' book". The Winnipeg Free Press. 21 September 2003. p. d2.
  13. Riippa, Laurele (9 August 2004). "Fall trade paperbacks: Cookbooks, wine, and entertaining". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 25 June 2023.
  14. Robertson, Ray (12 September 1999), "This is The End — A scholarly pair ditch the tweed in an entertaining look at millennial and centennial madness through the ages", The Toronto Star, p. 1
  15. Morton, Mark (2005). Dirty Words: The Story of Sex Talk (hardcover). Atlantic. ISBN 1843543842.
  16. Faber, Michel (30 July 2005), "L if for lalochezia", The Guardian, retrieved 25 June 2023
  17. de Jour, Belle (30 July 2005). "I love it when you talk dirty". The Times (London). p. 10. Retrieved 30 June 2023.
  18. Posner, Michael (20 October 2003), "A scholar's linguistic history of smut", The Globe and Mail, pp. R3, retrieved 30 June 2023
  19. Atkinson, Nathalie (14 February 2004), "Erotica of the mind from A to Z", National Post, pp. RB06
  20. Gilbert, N.L. (September 2008). "Cooking with Shakespeare". Choice Reviews. 46 (1). doi:10.5860/CHOICE.46-0062.
  21. Rambo, Bill (April 27, 2024). "Young-adult sci-fi debut deftly mulls humanity, freedom". The Winnipeg Free Press. Retrieved July 18, 2024.
  22. Morton, Mark. "Mark Morton: Publications". Mark Morton: Publications. Retrieved July 3, 2023.

External links

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