Hal Niedzviecki is a writer, culture commentator and editor whose work challenges preconceptions and confronts readers with the offenses of everyday life. He is co-founder of Broken Pencil, the magazine of zine culture and the independent arts and edited the magazine from 1995 to 2002. He is also co-founder of the annual Canzine festival of Underground Culture, and served as director of the festival from 1995 to 2002. He continues to be involved with the magazine and festival as President of the Broken Pencil Board of Directors and Special Projects Coordinator.

Niedzviecki began his publishing career with two books in 1998: First came the gritty anthology Concrete Forest, the new fiction of urban Canada, published by McClelland & Stewart. "Essential reading," according to the Ottawa Citizen. Around the same time, Smell It, his first book of short fiction, was published by Coach House Books The Toronto Star called it: "Dark and bitterly funny." "For the young and hip only," warned the Globe and Mail. In 1999 Coach House Books published Lurvy, his fictional funny retelling of E.B. White's Charlotte's Web done from the point of view of the farmhand. "This novel can reel you in and make you chortle with wicked laughter," said the National Post. "The playful games and audacious performance of Lurvy recommend it," opined the Globe and Mail.

Niedzviecki then turned his sights on non-fiction. Filled with ideas that had accumulated during the course of his many encounters with independent culture creators, he wrote his first work of social criticism, We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture, published by Penguin Canada in Spring 2000. "We Want Some Too Rocks all over the place," said the Globe and Mail.

Then it was back to fiction. In Fall 2001, Random House Canada published Hal's novel Ditch, a coming-of-age cyber-porn thriller. Said the Globe and Mail: "Challenging, bravely original and skillfully executed....but also creepy, sickening, and possibly downright offensive...This is one of the riskiest undertakings by a Canadian writer of Niedzviecki's generation, and it undoubtedly succeeds." Commented the Toronto Star: "Niedzviecki evinces incredible restraint in his prose, combined with an ability to create curt, vivid bursts of description and meaning, a skill requiring equal amounts of courage and confidence."

After Ditch, Niedzviecki worked on two co-authored projects. In Fall 2001 Doubleday Canada published the book Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer which Hal co-wrote with University of Toronto professor and inventor Steve Mann. In Fall 2002, Penguin Canada put forth The Original Canadian City Dweller's Almanac, a miscellany of facts, rants and unsupported assertions that celebrates the zeitgeist of the Canadian city. That book was co-written with poet and critic Darren Wershler-Henry.

Hal's writing has appeared in newspapers, periodicals and journals across North America including Adbusters, the Utne Reader, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Toronto Life, Geist, Azure and This Magazine. He was the recipient of the Alexander Ross Award for Best New Magazine Writer at the 1999 National Magazine Awards and has presented his work at gatherings across North America including the prestigious International Festival of Authors in Toronto. Once dubbed the "guru of independent/alternative action" by the Toronto Star, Niedzviecki is committed to exploring the human condition through provocative fiction and non-fiction that charts the media saturated terrain of ever shifting multiple identities at the heart of our fragmenting age.

Born: January 9, 1971

Grew up in: Ottawa, Ontario and Potomac, Maryland (suburban Washington D.C.)

Currently lives in: Toronto, Ontario

Studied at: University of Toronto (B.A. in Philosophy and English Literature) and Bard College (M.F.A. in creative writing)