Who is he?

Leonard Norman Cohen was born September 21st, 1934 in Montreal, Quebec. He was born into a middle-class, first generation Canadian, Jewish family (mother from Lithuania, father from Poland). Starting in 1951, his post-secondary education started, with an undergraduate degree from Mcgill University, followed by Mcgill Law, Columbia University and then an honorary degree from Dalhousie.
In 1961, just 5 years after his first published work, Cohen moved to Cuba, at the height of the US-Cuba Cold War tensions, where he was a great supporter of the well-known revolutionary, Che Guevara. He had a brief stint in the Israeli airforce and fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
During the 1970's, Cohen had a relationship with Suzanne Elrod, an L.A. artist, with whom he had two children (Adam in 1972, Lorca in 1974). He never married Suzanne, which he sums up to feelings of "cowardice and fear".

In 1996, he was ordained as a Buddhist monk and spent a brief time in a monastery, where he found ample opportunities to write. So in 2007, after another album was released, he began a 3 year tour and has another album coming out later on this year. That will put him at exactly 55 years so far in the business! And in those five and a half decades, Leonard Cohen has publish 2 novels, 12 Studio albums and 14 collections of songs and poems.