Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn (born 1959) is a Canadian journalist, columnist, and film and music critic. In recent years, he has written mostly about politics, from a conservative viewpoint. His 2006 book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, was a New York Times Bestseller.

Steyn was born in Toronto, Canada and educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, England, but dropped out of education at 16 and returned to Canada to work as a disc jockey. His first break in journalism came when he was hired as the musical theatre critic for the then newly-established The Independent in London in 1986 (his first review was for The Phantom Of The Opera).

In 1992 he became film critic for The Spectator (then owned by the Hollinger group). After a number of years writing predominantly about the arts, his portfolio widened to embrace political comment and he moved to The Daily Telegraph, a conservative-leaning London broadsheet which was also owned by the Hollinger group at the time. Steyn became a close ally of former Canadian and Hollinger chief Conrad Black, and subsequently wrote for many of Black's newspapers.

He is unusual among political writers because of his lack of tertiary education and his sideways move from arts criticism into punditry. This move may have been precipitated by a conflict between Steyn and Hollinger over his status in the mid-90s: Steyn's movie reviews temporarily disappeared from their pages and when he returned, Steyn had been made a senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc. Publications, senior North American columnist for Britain's Telegraph Group, and North American editor for The Spectator.

Since then, he has written prolifically for a wide range of publications, many of them owned by Hollinger, including the Jerusalem Post in Israel, the Chicago Sun Times and the "Happy Warrior" column for National Review in the United States, The Australian, and formerly for the Irish Times in Ireland. He wrote for the Canadian newspaper National Post in the late 90s, but his position became uncertain after the purchase of the newspaper by Canwest Global; he ceased to write there in May 2003.

In Canada, he now writes weekly for Maclean's and twice monthly for the Western Standard. He also writes theatre reviews for the New Criterion, obituaries for the Atlantic Monthly, and makes weekly appearances on The Hugh Hewitt Show, a conservative talk radio programme. As of April 2007, Steyn is no longer writing for the Atlantic following a disagreement with the editors.