Mark Bonokoski is a veteran award-winning columnist with the Toronto Sun, focusing primarily on human-interest news. He was honored in 2004 with a National Newspaper Award citation for column writing, and has been a frequent winner of the Dunlop Award as Sun Media’s top columnist. A graduate of the Ryerson University journalism department, his career as a columnist began in 1977, after serving as a general-assignment reporter with the Calgary Herald and the Windsor Star, before joining the Toronto Sun in 1974.

Between 1988 and 1991, he served as Sun Media’s European bureau chief, stationed in London, Eng., covering such international events as the escalating troubles in Northern Ireland, the terrorist bombing of the Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, the coming down of the Berlin Wall, and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. He also travelled extensively in southern Africa.

In 1991, he was named Editor of the Ottawa Sun and, in 1997, he was named the newspaper’s Publisher and CEO.

He returned to his writer’s roots in 2000 as National Affairs columnist for Sun Media, in Ottawa, and then returned to the Toronto Sun as a columnist in 2002, where he remains.

To stretch his legs with longer pieces, he has had his freelance work published in Maclean’s and Reader’s Digest.

His radio commentaries can be heard on the Haliburton Broadcasting Group network of radio stations north of the 905.