Marq de Villiers was born in 1940 in Bloemfontein, South Africa. He and his wife, the writer Sheila Hirtle live in Eagle Head, Nova Scotia. They often collaborate together on books.

He won a Governor General's Award in 1999 for his Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource, and the Evelyn Richardson Prize for Non Fiction for A Dune Adrift, a book on Sable Island, written with Sheila Hirtle. His Witch in the Wind: The True Story of the Legendary Bluenose, published in 2007, won the Evelyn Richardson Prize for Non-fiction as well as the Dartmouth Book Award for Non-fiction. Timbuktu: The Sahara's Fabled City of Gold, was published in the fall of 2007, and his most recent book, Dangerous World, was published by Penguin in spring 2008 and by Thomas Dunne-St. Martin's Press in the U.S., under the title, The End. In 2010, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada.