Alan Cumyn was born in Ottawa, Canada in 1960, and began writing poetry and short stories in high school. In 1979 he attended Royal Roads Military College in Victoria, British Columbia, but found that a year of miltary life was sufficent. By 1984 he had a degree in English and History from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and an M.A. in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Windsor, where he studied under Alistair MacLeod.

For the next two years Alan Cumyn ran a group home in Toronto for the national youth volunteer organization Katimavik. In 1986 he married Suzanne Evans and spent the next year in the coal- mining, train station town of Xuzhou, China, teaching English. The year abroad launched a career in various posts in international development, and was the inspiration for both Cumyn's first novel, Waiting for Li Ming, published by Goose Lane Editions in 1993, and for his popular guide to work and study abroad, What in the World is Going On?, first published in 1988 by the Canadian Bureau for International Education (CBIE). From 1991 to 1999 Cumyn worked for the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, researching and writing papers on human rights conditions in various countries. On leave in 1994, he moved with his young family to Salatiga in Central Java and taught for half a year at Satya Wacana Christian University. The time abroad and the persistent interest in human rights triggered Cumyn’s two-part human rights saga, Man of Bone and Burridge Unbound, about a tortured Canadian diplomat who survives his ordeal and then tries to right the world. Both novels won the Ottawa Book Award, and shortlistings for the Giller Prize (Burridge Unbound) and Trillium Award (Man of Bone) brought wider recognition for Cumyn’s work. Alan Cumyn began writing for his own children when they were young, finding inspiration in stories from his own youth, particularly around a period when his family lived in a broken-down farmhouse outide of Saint John, New Brunswick in the mid-1960s. Between them The Secret Life of Owen Skye, After Sylvia and Dear Sylvia have won or been shortlisted for twelve national awards in Canada. The books have been read in homes and classrooms throughout North America and in Germany and South Korea. His latest novel for young readers, Tilt, is a frankly sexual exploration of male adolescence. Cumyn’s brothers are both in the arts: Richard Cumyn is a writer, Steve Cumyn an actor. Alan Cumyn feels equally comfortable writing for adults or for younger audiences. Secretly he is trying to write for everybody. He would like younger readers to wade into the historical materials in his two-part World War I saga, The Sojourn and The Famished Lover, and is thrilled when adults fall into his tales of Owen Skye and Sylvia Tull. Cumyn’s most recent novella, All Night, is adapted from a play of the same name. A new young adult novel, Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend, is forthcoming from Atheneum Books and Simon & Schuster in Canada, the United States and the UK.