The son of a doctor, Osborne was born in 1947 in Pangnirtung on Baffin Island, Northwest Territories (now Nunavut), and grew up in Edmonton, Kamloops and Vancouver.
[1] In 1971, he co-founded Arsenal Pulp Press, a literary book publisher based in Vancouver.
Osborne published a collection of personal essays, Ice & fire: Dispatches from the New World, 1988-1998 in 1999.
He won the CBC Literary Award for Travel Writing in 2003 for his essay Girl Afraid of Haystacks.
He has written introductions to the books The North End (photographs by John Paskievich) and One Ring Circus: Extreme Wrestling in the Minor Leagues[3][4] Osborne currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.