Robert Bringhurst

Robert Bringhurst (born 1946) is a Canadian poet, typographer and author. He has translated substantial works from Haida and Navajo and from classical Greek and Arabic. He wrote The Elements of Typographic Style, a reference book of typefaces, glyphs and the visual and geometric arrangement of type. He was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in June 2013. He lives on Quadra Island, near Campbell River, British Columbia (approximately 170 km northwest of Vancouver) with his wife, Jan Zwicky, a poet and philosopher. Life Bringhurst was born on October 16, 1946, in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Alberta, and British Columbia. He studied architecture, linguistics, and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and comparative literature and philosophy at the University of Utah. He holds a BA from Indiana University (1973) and an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia (1975). In 2006, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of the Fraser Valley, and in 2016 was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by Simon Fraser University. Bringhurst taught literature, art history and history of typography at several universities and held fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the American Philosophical Society, and the Guggenheim Foundation.