Brought up in Abingdon-on-Thames, Michael Fortescue moved to California with his family in 1956,but returned to school in England and then Switzerland before eventually gaining a master's degree in Slavic languages and literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. After a number of years of globe-trotting, teaching speed reading in London and English in Japan and the South of France he went on to earn a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Edinburgh.
Thence he moved to Denmark as a researcher and lecturer in Arctic languages, which involved fieldwork in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, and Siberia.
After many years working as a professor of linguistics, he recently retired and moved with his wife to the Cotswolds, not far from his birthplace.
The author of numerous academic books and articles, he has also published short stories and verse, as well as 'Ujarak', a novel in Danish set in Greenland, and 'The Domain of Language', a humorous introduction to linguistics. Most recently he has self-published a quirky trilogy 'The Adventures of the Flubb' and a series of tall stories set in a humerous novel 'The Abingdon Chronicles'. More of the sort is in the pipeline.