Ted’s most recent book, The Social Life of Inktook him to Budapest and Buenos Aires in search of the ballpoint pen, to China for traditional ink sticks, and to Uzbekistan where he encountered the world’s oldest Qur’an – the blood-soaked Samarkand Codex.
His account of riding a Ducati Monster from Alberta to Austin TX, Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books, earned nominations for the Governor General’s Award, and the Writers’ Trust Drainie-Taylor biography prize. It won the City of Edmonton Book Prize, the Alberta Writers’ Guild Wilfred Eggleston Award, and the national Motorcycle Award of Excellence (MAX).
Riding with Rilke was also named a Best Book by the Toronto Globe and Mail, CBC’s Talking Books, and Playboy magazine, where editor Amy Grace Lloyd called it a “tribute to life, literature, and landscape.”
Ted has written about striding in a fashion show (“Strange Tales from the Catwalk”), sliding in an avalanche (“Sluff!”), and dripping enchiladas on an ebook (“Living with the Kindle”). His shorter nonfiction has appeared in the Globe and Mail and other Canadian newspapers, Enroute, Prairie Fire, Cycle Canada, Alberta Views, and Rider, as well as in the collections What I Meant to Say: The Private Lives of Men, Edmonton on Location, and Word Carving. His travel essay “The Hawkman of Kandahar” won the Prairie Fire award for non-fiction, he has received a CBC literary award for travel, and two nominations for National Magazine Awards for his motorcycle essays.
He has taught creative nonfiction, book history, and modernist literature at the University of Alberta. As Edward L. Bishop he edited the manuscript of Virginia Woolf’s first experimental novel, Jacob’s Room for Pace University Press, and published a critical edition of the novel for Blackwell’s Shakespeare Head Press edition of Virginia Woolf. He also published work on the Bloomsbury Group, James Joyce, dust jackets, archives, and bookstores. In 2017 he was inducted into The Edmonton Arts and Culture Hall of Fame.