Charles Montgomery

Charles Montgomery (born 1968) is an award-winning Canadian writer and photojournalist.

Born in North Vancouver, British Columbia, he spent his formative years on a farm on Vancouver Island, and was educated at the University of Victoria and Langara College. Montgomery began his career at the Lillooet Bridge River News the The Vancouver Sun. He lived in Hong Kong from 1996 to 1998, where he wrote stories for the Hong Kong Shipping Gazette and HK Magazine.

Montgomery's writing about environment, adventure, cultural convergence and myth has appeared in magazines and newspapers in Canada, the United States and Hong Kong, including Outside Magazine, Explore Magazine, Canadian Geographic, enRoute, The National Post, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and The South China Morning Post. His magazine writing has won four Western Canada Magazine Awards, a 2004 silver National Magazine award and the 2003 American Society of Travel Writer’s Lowell Thomas Silver Award for best North American travel story.

His first book, published in Canada as The Last Heathen (2004), is a narrative description of Montgomery's search for the legacy of Victorian missionaries (among them his great-grandfather bishop Henry Montgomery) in the South Pacific archipelago of Melanesia. It includes encounters with cargo cults, pagan ancestor-worshippers and militants in Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. The book won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction in 2005. Prize jurors called it “an irresistible adventure in discovery, a journey into rough terrain and a revelation of the power of ancestral stories across cultural divides." The book has also won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and was short-listed for two Writers’ Trust awards.

Montgomery is a member of the FCC, a collective of Vancouver-based literary journalists who use stories about the world to shed light on contemporary issues. He has been influenced by the music of Manu Chao and the writings of Malcolm Lowry, Laurens van der Post, Bruce Chatwin, Cervantes, and Paul William Roberts.

He is based in Vancouver and Mexico City.