Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, reviewed Tom Bentley’s first book of short stories, Blind Man’s Drum, stating that “Bentley transforms the inner monologues of family guilt and grudge and bafflement into darkly comic arias of the unspoken. The best moments here are as good as writing gets.” The Danforth Review in Toronto wrote “it’s the best satirical look at what Canada once was since Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Small Town.”

Since Tom Bentley’s initial foray into writing, his work has been published in fourteen magazines in both the U.S. and Canada, including The Dalhousie Review and New West Review. He was a finalist for the best fiction Saskatchewan Book Awards, the National Magazine Award for Humour for his story Wars and Rumours of Wars, and was nominated for the Governor Generals Literary Awards, the Commonwealth Writer Prize and The Writer Trust of Canada. 

Tom has received three commissions to write for the theatre, including a musical celebrating the life of small town Canada and featuring a Ku Klux Klan Tango, and Friends, a play published by Red Deer Press, which has been produced throughout North America. Tom has also had his work produced by C.B.C., written the forward to sixteen publications of new plays, and had his lyrics recorded. Most recently Tom wrote Iliada, an adaptation based on An Iliad, by Alessandro Baricco. The production was presented as part of an international theatre festival in Barcelona. 

Currently Tom is working in partnership with his associate Angie Tysseland on a musical about Stanislavsky, is collaborating on a book about his approach to teaching acting, and finishing two novels, The Unknotted Tongue and Hoopla.
  
Tom Bentley-Fisher writes under the name Tom Bentley.