Biography
Downey was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and from an early age took an interest in reading. Although he was routinely encouraged by teachers to read books that would challenge him, Downey’s formative reading consisted almost exclusively of comic books, Choose Your Own Adventure novels, Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and the manuals and rulebooks of fantasy and science-fiction role-playing games, specifically Dungeons and Dragons and BattleTech.
Downey’s interest in games eventually served to direct the course of his education. He received his B.A. from McMaster University in 1991, and his M.A. a year later, writing his Masters’ Thesis on the chess problem in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. He earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Victoria in 1998, expanding on his previous graduate work in examining the development of the chess motif in the Victorian novel.
After teaching at both the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia, where he won the Ian Fairclough Prize for Teaching in 2000, Downey left to pursue a B.Ed. in English and Mathematics Education at the University of Western Ontario’s Althouse College. While in the program, he submitted the manuscript for his first book, The Fifty Fatal Flaws of Essay Writing, which Althouse published in 2002. Since then, he has held a variety of teaching and administrative positions at public and private institutions, and has taught courses in Children’s Literature and Twenty-First Century Literacies in the graduate education program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
Read more about this topic: Glen Downey (writer)
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