Deborah (Mason) Cowley is a freelance writer and broadcaster. She grew up in Toronto, graduated from the University of Western Ontario and moved to Ottawa to work for the Unitarian Service Committee. She spent two years with UNHCR (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) in Beirut before moving back to Ottawa and a job with CIDA. As she traveled the world with her diplomat husband, she worked as a reporter for CBC radio in Washington, D.C. and on a posting to Cairo, she worked on several TV documentaries for CBC’s Man Alive. Also in Egypt, she wrote the first official guide book to Cairo since Baedeker’s guide in the 1940’s.
Subsequent postings in London and Brussels gave her the chance to write articles for the British and International editions of Reader’s Digest. Research for these took her to Kenya to report on AMREF’s Flying Doctors, to Bangalore, India with ORBIS’ team of eye doctors working out of a DC10, to Northern Uganda to interview Dr. Lucille Teasdale, to Tanzania to meet chimpanzee guru, Jane Goodall in her lakeside home and to Stockholm to interview Queen Sylvia of Sweden.
With Jane Goodall
With Queen Sylvia
On her return to Canada in 1991, she wrote, with her husband, One Woman’s Journey: A Portrait of Pauline Vanier and edited the wartime letters of the former governor general, published as Georges Vanier: Soldier.
In 2000, she traveled to Ghana to write about Kathy Knowles, a young Canadian who was setting up children’s libraries in the capital, Accra. This visit lead to a long association with Kathy and the project and included 17 visits to Ghana. Kathy’s work in Ghana is documented in Deborah’s most recent book The Library Tree: How a Canadian Woman brought the joy of reading to a generation of African children.
Deborah Cowley, writer and broadcaster 