John Mogan was born in Toronto and raised at Paris in western Ontario.
After high school, he studied English language and literature at the
University of Toronto, where he took his BA (1951) and his MA (1957).
He taught English between those degrees at Etobicoke Collegiate in
Toronto and entered medicine in 1957.

He went into family practice from 1963, and married Ann Stewart-Burton,
an obstetrician-gynecologist. They had two children. In 1969 he was
awarded a Harvard Fellowship in psychiatry, and the family moved to the United States. He practiced in Massachusetts until his retirement in 1993.
He then took locum tenens positions in Maine and Arizona.

His wife died in 1997, and he moved back to Canada in 2008 where he resides now in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Though he wrote extensively all his life, he began creative writing in 1987, and began publishing in 2000. All his works are fictional with the exception
of his last book, A Journey Towards Poetry in 2012.