Robin Ward is a writer, graphic designer and architecture critic, born and raised in Glasgow. He took a gap year to the Canadian north, as a fur-trading clerk for the Hudson's Bay Company, and travelled across Canada before returning to Scotland to study at Glasgow School of Art. His interest in architecture was inspired by a high school trip to Basil Spence's Coventry Cathedral, study at the Mackintosh Building at the GSA and a post-graduate scholarship to Italy. He wrote and illustrated a column for the Herald (Glasgow), worked in London as a designer with the BBC and relocated to Vancouver in 1988. He has travelled widely in Canada, Europe and South-east Asia (he married into a Thai family). For 10 years, he was the architecture critic at The Vancouver Sun. He has received awards for design, illustration and journalism, including a Heritage Canada Achievement Award and a prize in The Architectural Review Centenary Drawing Competition. He is based in Edinburgh.