Matthew Hughes was born in Liverpool, England, in 1949 and came to Canada with his family when he was five. He's been a writer all of his adult life: first as a journalist; then as staff speechwriter to the Canadian Ministers of Justice, Small Business and Environment; and - since 1979 - as a freelance corporate and political speechwriter in British Columbia.

Matthew is a university drop-out from a working poor background. Before he got into newspapers, he worked in a factory that made school desks, drove a grocery delivery truck, was night janitor in a GM dealership, and was briefly an orderly in a private mental hospital. As a teenager, he served a year as a volunteer with the Company of Young Canadians, which included six months of living in a log cabin in northern Alberta with a Metis family and two weeks fighting a forest fire...

Matthew Hughes is married with three sons. He is a lapsed member of Mensa.

Biography provided by the author, June 2002